A rental agreement sets forth duties that should be carried out by both the landlord and tenant. These duties are laid out so that if one party breaches the other party will be able to recover under a legal remedy. However, what happens when a landlord never actually had the legal right to assume these duties and enter into a contract with a tenant? Perhaps when the landlord knew that the rental unit did not meet the local building requirements or did not have a certificate of occupancy. This could lead to serious issues for both the landlord and the tenant. In theory, this could make an entire rental agreement null and void.
Generally, the courts cannot be used to enforce a contract that is illegal or against public policy. For instance an agreement to buy illegal drugs could not be enforced in the courts. This sounds almost nonsensical as it is common sense that surely no one would go to the courts and request them to enforce such an illegal contract. However, this happens every day in Florida in landlord tenant actions. Landlords who are knowingly providing substandard housing are evicting tenants based on a contract that should be illegal. Now this is not the fault of the courts as the court is not going to assert defenses for the tenants, especially defenses that are not easily seen in the complaint itself.
In Lassiter & Co. v. Taylor, 99 Fla. 819, a Florida Supreme Court case, the court held, “[t]his, then, is the undoubted rule, that, when a contract is expressly prohibited by law, no court of justice will entertain an action upon it, or upon any asserted rights growing out of it. And the reason is apparent; for to permit this would be for the law to aid in its own undoing.” It seems that if there is ever a true public interest it is in housing and the conditions that we allow people to live in. We have housing laws imposed for many good reasons including health and safety. So the question seems to be if your landlord entered into a lease with you, knowing that the rental property did not meet housing code, is there really even a binding contract at all? If there is not, and the contract, in essence, is illegal, should this not prevent a court from applying Chapter 83 (statute that authorizes eviction) awarding damages to a landlord who was suing for breach against a tenant. The Supreme Court held in Bank of the US v. Owens, 27 US 527, that “[n]o court of justice can, in its nature, be made the handmaid of iniquity. Courts are instituted to carry into effect the laws of the country. How can they become auxiliary to the consummation of violations of law? There can be no civil right where there can be no legal remedy, and there can be no legal remedy for that which is itself illegal.”
Perhaps if we are truly interested in preventing slumlords from continuing to rent substandard housing we would perhaps start refusing to enforce their illegal contracts. We know the argument of the slumlord – “the tenant agreed to the conditions when they moved in.” This doesn’t work for a residential tenancy, there can be no consent of the tenant that would make the contract legal IF the contract was illegal from the beginning.
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