Landlord Control of Tenant Behavior: An Instance of Private Environmental Legislation

The present Article suggests that the problem of incompatible neighboring tenants can be most efficiently and justly dealt with by permitting a substantial degree of landlord control over tenant behavior-with the removal of offending tenants, at the landlord\u27s instance, being the most effective sanction of ultimate recourse in the effectuation of such control. For some courts, ceding this power of control to landlords would require a measure of constraint which they may find uncustomary or even distasteful. As institutions charged with doing justice, the courts\u27 instinct to intervene in the norm-creating process is undoubtedly great, even when the parties before the court have ostensibly agreed beforehand to the norms of behavior (and consequences of violation) which are to apply. Of course, such intervention is appropriate when the privately established norms or consequences contravene some articulable public policy, such as prohibitions on visits by members of racial minorities or incarceration of an offending tenant as a sanction. But the courts have not limited their second guessing on the propriety of agreed norms or sanctions to cases where the adverse effect on the tenant violates some clear public policy. In New York, for example, tenants have been allowed to physically attack their neighbors, gas themselves in the kitchen, keep accumulated garbage and unhygienic animals in their apartments and play piano scales twelve hours per day without jeopardizing their possessory rights or losing the sympathy of the courts. Perhaps the courts in such cases ask themselves, Where can these people go? But where can their neighbors go