A happy medium? Telephone hearings for litigants in person facing housing eviction

ABSTRACT

Courts around the world moved rapidly to adopt remote hearings as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. This accelerated a trend that pre-dated the pandemic, as governments and courts looked to remote hearings for their potential cost savings and the promise of greater accessibility. The debate about remote hearings has focused on using audio-visual technology, but audio-only hearings are widely used and involve the much more accessible technology, the telephone. Can an effective hearing (a key component of access to justice) be delivered by telephone? Drawing on a study of the New Zealand housing court, this article considers the benefits and problems for tenants – unrepresented and often vulnerable participants – when using audio-only hearings. It concludes that audio-hearings do offer the potential for greater access to justice as long as these hearings include adequate preparation, access to information, and support for the tenants.

KEYWORDS:

• Telephone hearings
• housing cases
• access to justice
• litigants in person

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the tenants, owners, property managers and their support people, whom I observed and to the adjudicators and mediators who generously gave up their time to speak with me. Thank you also to Kayla Stewart who provided research assistance for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The name ‘tribunal’ has a broad application in New Zealand, being applied to the jurisdictions for housing, small claims, and the review tribunals for administrative decisions though these bodies have very different characteristics from one another (New Zealand Law Commission 2008).

2. Quotes from these different data sources are represented in this article using the following codes: A = adjudicator interview, M = mediator interview, TM = tenancy mediation (by telephone), TH = tenancy hearing (in person). Each interview or observation is also numbered.

3. Readers familiar with mediation theory will no doubt note that the interaction raises a number of questions about the ethics of the mediation (Dingwall 1988, Field and Crowe 2020).

4. Government Centre for Dispute Resolution ‘Our Mission’ https://www.mbie.govt.nz/cross-government-functions/government-centre-for-dispute-resolution/who-we-are/ (accessed 3 September 2021).