Help a tenant or an advocate propose a correct set of jury instructions for an eviction trial, drawn from the wording the court has already approved, with the missing and the contested instructions flagged for a lawyer.
This page is the shared target for this situation. Any court, legal aid office, or builder working on it in their own region can take the vision, the blueprints, and the standards here instead of starting over, and set the parts that are local to them. The point is that the same work is not designed from scratch in every county.
Does this match how it goes where you are? Leave a note on this workflow.
When an eviction case reaches a jury, the trial ends with the judge reading out a set of instructions that tell the jurors how to apply the law to what they heard. The parties propose those instructions and the judge decides which ones are read. An instruction that is missing, wrong, or refused is a common ground for appeal, so the set that gets filed decides what the jury is allowed to consider.
Most of what a party proposes comes from pattern instructions, which are the wording a court has already approved for common points of law. The drafting happens under deadline, near the end of trial preparation, and often from scratch. A party works out which instructions cover every element and every defense in dispute, retypes the approved wording, fills it with the names, dates, and facts of the case, drafts anything the approved set does not cover, and files the list for the other side and the judge to react to.
In California the approved set is the Judicial Council’s civil jury instructions, which practitioners call CACI, and the parties file a joint list of what each side proposes. The list carries a printed row and a box for each numbered instruction, the verdict forms under their own numbering, and blank rows at the end where a party writes in an instruction it has drafted itself. Those written-in instructions carry no number, and the form says to print them and provide them as an attachment.
A tenant representing themselves may not propose any instructions at all. Court self help centers report that people come to them for help with jury documents and there is little to hand over.
The approved instructions and the form differ from state to state. What carries across is the work of connecting each defense and each element in dispute to the instruction that covers it, and the discipline of reproducing approved wording exactly.
The instructions are drafted under deadline by whoever is holding the file. The approved wording gets retyped and filled in by hand, the same party’s name ends up spelled differently from one instruction to the next, and a tenant without a lawyer proposes nothing at all.
A party assembles a correct set of proposed instructions covering everything in dispute, drawn from the wording the court has approved. The blanks are filled from case details a person has confirmed. Every change to the approved wording is marked, every blank still empty is shown, and the contested instructions go to a lawyer before the list is filed.
This is one vision, taken from the draft standard for this workflow and from a working prototype built against one court’s form. Technology could play out in other ways here, and the cohort weighs them against this one.
Who this serves: Tenants and the advocates preparing an eviction for trial, the self help center staff people ask for jury documents, the attorneys who review what gets filed, and the courts that receive the proposed instructions.
Where this came from: A draft of this workflow and its standard already sat in the Commons materials, and a working prototype has been built against one court’s joint list form, including an account of what that build got wrong. This page is built from both. The cohort for this area picks it up from here.
A tenant facing eviction often has more than one of these problems at once. This page covers the instructions proposed for the trial, and these are the workflows around it, with the point where each one hands over.
Answering an eviction caseThe jury demand is made in the answer, and a tenant who does not make it then cannot make it later. This workflow starts from a case where somebody made that demand in time. Eviction notice defect spottingThe defects found in the notice become defenses in the answer, and every defense still in dispute at trial needs an instruction behind it here. Reviewing a settlement offer before an eviction hearingEviction cases often settle, and the settlement review workflow covers the point where a case either ends or carries on toward the trial this page prepares for.The step-by-step agenda is open for review now. The cohort writes the functional agenda and the standards from the answers that come back, and this page carries them when they exist.
What a system here has to do, written as the work in order and in plain words, with the question the Commons team wants answered about each part. Start here if you have taken an eviction to a jury and want to say what a tool needs.
Read the step-by-step agenda →What the system must do, from reading the complaint and the list of proposed instructions, through the boxes each side has checked, the instructions a party writes itself, the approved wording for each number, the blanks filled with the facts of the case, the check that every disputed issue has an instruction, the lawyer review, and the document that gets filed. Two findings from a working build belong in the specification: a checked row the system cannot read has to show on screen rather than be dropped from the run, and the same case with the same corrections has to produce the same document every time.
How anyone judges whether a builder did this well: whether the set covers every element and every defense in dispute, whether the wording matches the approved text word for word, whether every change to it is marked, and what the reviewing attorney still has to correct.
The rest of the package follows once those two exist. It covers the baseline numbers, the procurement and contract terms, the reference architecture, which says what any jurisdiction can take as it is and what each place has to set for itself, the stories and materials from teams who have already built something here, and the tests.
The housing cohort is forming now, and this is one of the workflows in front of it. Members bring what they have seen in their own courts, argue about what a tool here has to do, and read the drafts.