Two recent reports from Stanford Law School’s Community Law Clinic take on the issue of evictions. “Evictions in San Mateo County, 2019–2023,” released in collaboration with Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto and the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, analyzes and compares all eviction cases filed in San Mateo County from the last full year before the pandemic (2019) and the first full year after COVID-era moratoria expired (2023). The report offers an in-depth look at eviction patterns in the county where the clinic represents low-income tenants. The top-line finding: Evictions are on the rise, with the vast majority based on alleged nonpayment of rent. The report offers a unique analysis of eviction cases: Because under California law most eviction cases are sealed, the research team secured a court order to access and anonymize case records.

The second report, authored by Professor Juliet Brodie through the Law and Policy Lab, features research by a student team working on behalf of its client Public Advocates, a civil rights nonprofit advocacy organization. “Win-Win: Paying Landlords and Keeping Californians Housed” analyzes so-called rights to “redeem” a tenancy—to pay back rent allegedly due through the eviction process and restore the tenancy nationwide. The report concluded that 21 states had a right to redeem and encouraged California to become the 22nd. The report informed a bill, the Keeping Californians Housed Act, introduced in February by State Senator Dr. Aisha Wahab (SB 436), that would address some of these issues. “A right to redeem is intuitive in cases of nonpayment,” says Clinic Director Brodie. “Many states have created a right of redemption as a common-sense approach that preserves eviction for situations where the tenancy is truly financially unsustainable.”

Twenty years ago, a group of Stanford scholars, practitioners, and technologists saw the future of the legal system. Law and technology were no longer separate worlds, they observed, but increasingly interdependent forces. A multidisciplinary team spanning campus came together to lay one of the cornerstones of today’s legal-tech ecosystem with the launch of The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, CodeX, led by Stanford Law School’s Roland Vogl, JSM ’00, executive director, and Professor Michael Genesereth from the Computer Science Department, research director.

CodeX marked two decades of pioneering work with a robust schedule of events in April. The centerpiece of the celebratory week was the annual, all-day FutureLaw conference on April 10, a standing-room-only event that, for the past 12 years, has brought together global leaders in legal technology, artificial intelligence, and computational law. This year, FutureLaw reflected on CodeX’s 20 years of research and real-world applications—and looked ahead at how to best tackle emerging challenges in legal innovation. SL