Eviction Court as Policy Implementation Venue

During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal and state governments implemented unprecedented housing policies to prevent mass eviction, yet these policies’ effects varied widely across jurisdictions despite uniform formal design. This paper examines the eviction courts through which that variation emerged. Drawing on observations of more than 2,000 eviction hearings in three Virginia General District Courts and interviews with legal aid attorneys, judges, court navigators, and tenant organizers, we use interpretively informed triangulation to examine how courts engage housing policy in practice. We conceptualize eviction courts as summary proceedings organized around the primacy of possession, which treat housing instability—a public problem—as a private dispute over unpaid rent. The paper introduces absorbed accordance to describe how these courts take policy up actively yet process it through routines built for rapid possessory resolution, so that the proceeding yields its ordinary outcomes rather than the results the policy intended. Four encounters of mooting, outrunning, bracketing, and absorbing specify how absorbed accordance operates as policy moves through the proceeding. Effective pandemic-era interventions reduced eviction only where implementation departed from the proceeding’s routine operation. These findings point to three strategic directions for engaging this kind of venue: bending courts through representation, restructuring the summary proceeding, or marginalizing courts through upstream intervention.