The court process a landlord must use to make a tenant leave - and in most states, the only lawful way to do it.
Eviction is a lawsuit. That single fact is the one most often misunderstood, and it cuts in the tenant's favour: in most states a landlord cannot lawfully remove a tenant by changing the locks, removing doors, putting belongings on the street, or shutting off heat, water or power. Those are "self-help" evictions and they are prohibited in most states, sometimes with penalties payable to the tenant. The lawful route runs through a court, and the case usually has a name like unlawful detainer, forcible entry and detainer, or summary process.
The process generally runs in three stages: a written notice with a stated reason and a period to fix the problem or leave; a court case filed if the tenant does not; and, only if the landlord wins, a court order carried out by a sheriff or marshal. A judgment for the landlord is not itself the removal - the removal is a separate step by a law enforcement officer.
These cases move much faster than ordinary civil litigation, which is the practical difficulty. They are designed for speed, hearings can come within days or weeks rather than months, and a tenant who does not appear will usually lose automatically. Defences that do exist - improper notice, a landlord's failure to maintain the property, retaliation, discrimination, payment already made - generally have to be raised at that hearing rather than afterwards.
Speed is the reason to get help immediately rather than after the hearing. An eviction judgment is not only the loss of the home: it commonly appears in tenant screening reports and can make the next tenancy much harder to obtain, which is a consequence that outlasts the case by years. This is also the single most common civil legal aid matter in the country, so a tenant who cannot afford a lawyer is in exactly the situation the legal aid programmes were built for - and the outcome for represented tenants differs enough from unrepresented ones that it is worth one phone call before the hearing date.
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