Your approach is that if I can't pull up my lease at a moments notice, my landlord can just evict me immediately?

My family is just out on our butts with no due process, locks changed, all our belongings locked up and we have to wait for court to let us back in.

The thing is, while this is easy to get upset about in theory and hard to see why it can't be dealt with more swiftly, there are huge risks to the impacted people.

Additionally, just like there are bad actors hurting property owners, there are just as many property owners who are bad actors and would love to evict people illegally.

Hell, in your proposed world, I could print fake ownership documents for a house I don't own and if the valid owners/renters can't immediately disprove me, then I can evict them immediately.

This is why we have due process. I'm all for streamlining it, but the home is the place you're supposed to be most secure, it shouldn't be something that can be taken from you in minutes over not having paperwork on you physically.

Woah, let's cool it with calling people dumb.

You don't typically need to be able to produce a rental or lease agreement within a time period of minutes. It's not like ID.

And unlike a deed to a house, you often don't have a physical copy, nor is it necessary to store it in a fireproof safe or anything.

So no... MOST people cannot produce their rental or lease agreement that quickly.

I could find it if I had to, but not that quickly.

So maybe back off on the attacks.

You can't logically call one possibility a hypothetical (owner trying to evict a legal tenant) and assume that the other possibility (owner trying to evict a squatter) is what's really happening.

What you're calling a hypothetical is something that has and does occur.

Bless your heart...

One of the things that you learn as a lawyer is that every law has to make sense in real life context and that punishments need proportion to the offense.

In real life, people are frequently irresponsible in small ways and being evicted at a moments notice over a small failure is completely out of proportion.

You can guffaw all you want, but that's part of actually understanding the law and not just internet theorycrafting.

And many people don't.

Some digital leasing systems don't automatically send you a copy.

I'm an educated professional, I'm even a former lawyer... and even I realized after 2 years at a rental property that I didn't have a copy of my lease agreement. Their system didn't email it and the only way to get it was to log into their system and download it after the property rep signed it.

Should I have done that? Yes, absolutely. But things happen, we get busy and reasonable things don't always get done.

Should my son and I be kicked out of my rental because I didn't have a copy on hand? That seems pretty harsh for the minor mistake of not downloading my lease agreement.

What if I didn't remember what site it was on? Or i can't log in for some reason? Or it only remains available for a short period?

What if it's in my partners name and i can't reach them?

There are a myriad of reasons that people might not have it at a moments notice.