Open the courthouse door to victims of harassment
The problem is most well known from the employment discrimination context, but it has had an impact on housing rights as well. Victims of harassment are effectively told by courts, "Go away, you have been harassed enough." Judicial trivializing of harassment on the employment side is detailed in Judith J. Johnson's License to Harass Women: Requiring Hostile Environment Sexual Harassment to be "Severe or Pervasive" Discriminates Among "Terms and Conditions" of Employment, 62 Md. L. Rev., 85 (2003).
Among the judicial techniques used are requiring that conduct be severe and pervasive (instead of severe or pervasive), and including the phenomenon of courts "tolerating conduct that would be considered sexual assault or attempted sexual assault under the criminatl law" and requiring "proof that the conduct tangibly affected the plaintiff's job performance." Other techniques include parsing evidence to avoid a finding of severe or pervasive; and rejecting "evidence of harassment that occurred before the employer took some remedial action even though [that action did] not stop the harassment." [quotations from pages 111, 115, and 131-33 of article]
If anything, the privacy of one's home is a zone that calls even more strongly for a "zero tolerance for harassment" rule.
The solution is first to recognize how courts treat non-harassment terms and conditions cases: they disaggregate the question of liability from the question of damages. Second, we should recognize that the "severe or pervasive" rule judicially legitimizes a very wide range of conduct -- even if the political reality is such that the "lowest" level of harassment is going to be tolerated, there is still room to proscribe a substantial portion of what is now considered legal.
Draft legislative language that would make all harassment actionable except that which the covered entity proves as an affirmative defense is nothing more than petty slights or trivial annoyances can be linked to below.
The question for opponents is: "Just how much harassment do you think that tenants should be required to endure?"