The Dynamics of Informal Procedure: The Case of a Public Housing Eviction Board

This paper examines a public housing eviction board and asks how the decision to prosecute cases informally affected both board action and the implications of that action. It argues that board decisions were patterned and that apparently similar procedures produced different outcomes at different points in time. Informality is seen as compatible with rule-oriented decisionmaking and as a factor that affects the ways that rules and outcomes may be changed and manipulated. Informal justice is not defined, but certain features, such as the quality of discourse in a tribunal, are posited as keys to judgments of informality. It is argued that these keys determine whether a tribunal is perceived as formal or informal but that the actual quality of tribunal need not fit this neat dichotomy, for it is a complex function of whether prosecutors, defendants, and judges take informal or legalistic stances toward the procedural and substantive issues that arise in a case.