Skelly Wright and the apartments of doom

If you're a renter and the toilet breaks, give thanks for Judge Skelly Wright as you call maintenance:

Javins v. First National Realty Company, a 1970 case, establishes the rule that landlords have to pay to keep buildings up to snuff, not tenants...

Skelly Wright... not only overturned nine centuries of property law in favor of the urban poor but handily convinced many other courts and state legislatures to do the same.

Georgetown Law's Javins Project website is full of PDF files from the trial and appellate levels of the case:

Javins v. First National Realty Corporation, 428 F.2d 1071 (D.C. Cir. 1970) was one of the most important landlord-tenant cases of the twentieth century. Read by most first year law students all over the country, Judge Skelly Wright's famous opinion firmly established the implied warranty of habitability as a staple of American property law.

Remember, when today's attackers of an independent judiciary go on about supposed judicial activism, they ain't seen nothing like the real thing: this blog's avatar, the Honorable J. Skelly Wright.

(for new visitors, from a site with a big ol' picture of Judge Wright)