Boston Housing Authority v. Hemingway, 293 N.E.2d 831 (1973)

Citation: Boston Housing Authority v. Hemingway, 293 N.E.2d 831 (1973)
Parent Document: Boston Housing Authority v. Hemingway, 293 N.E.2d 831 (1973)
Jurisdiction: Massachusetts (state)
Effective Date: 1973-03-05
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2000597/boston-housing-authority-v-hemingway/ ↗

Full Text

1,388 chars

Given the rural agrarian context in which these rules were judicially formulated, the independent covenants rule made sense. However, the rule’s strict application often produced harsh results in those cases where the tenant was more interested in the demised building than the land on which it was situated. The chief judicial response to this problem was the development of the “constructive eviction” doctrine “which relieved the tenant of his rent obligation if he could show that he had vacated the leased premises due to a severe failure of maintenance services amounting to a breach of the landlord’s duty to assure quiet possession.” Notes,. 56 Cornell L. Rev. 489, 491. See Nesson v. Adams, 212 Mass. 429 (1912). This rule allowed the court to mitigate some *190of the injustices stemming from strict application of the independent covenants rule without repudiating the rule’s basic premise that the lease was essentially a conveyance of a possessory interest in land for a term and not a contract for a dwelling suitable for human occupation. The constructive eviction doctrine created the legal fiction that the tenant had been “evicted” to show that the tenant’s possessory interest in the property itself was destroyed by the landlord’s failure to provide adequate maintenance services. It was the loss of the tenant’s possessory interest which excused him from paying rent.

Other Sections in This Document (181)

Full Text