In Eastside Exhibition Corp. v. 210 East 86th Street Corp., the Court of Appeals interpreted the longstanding “all-or-nothing” rule that a partial eviction from rented space justifies full rent abatement, finding the rule inapplicable in certain circumstances, such as the circumstances of that case. We address below this decision, as well as the Court’s decisions in separate appeals interpreting two provisions of the Drug Law Resentencing Act of 2009, a statute enacted to ameliorate some of the effects of the now-repealed “Rockefeller drug laws.” Finally, we discuss the Court’s decision considering for the first time whether the “scaffold law” applies to a factory worker engaged in cleaning a product in the course of a manufacturing process, and holding that it does not.
No Rent Abatement
The maxim ‘de minimis non curat lex’ carried the day for a commercial landlord whose tenant sought unsuccessfully to avoid paying any rent under a lease after the landlord, without giving notice to or receiving permission from tenant, entered the premises and installed two cross-bracing beams that occupied only 12 square feet of the 15,000 to 19,000 square foot leasehold. In Eastside Exhibitions Corp. v. 210 East 86th Street Corp., the Court of Appeals, in an opinion for a 6-1 majority by Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, held that without any effect on the tenants’ use and enjoyment of the leasehold or demonstrable damages, the interference by the landlord was too trivial to support a claim of partial eviction and justify total rent abatement to the tenant.
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