New York Court of Appeals Roundup: Rent Abatement Requires Demonstrated Damages or Non-Trivial Loss of Use
In their monthly column in the New York Law Journal, Roy Reardon and Mary Elizabeth McGarry discuss in Eastside Exhibition Corp. v. 210 East 86th Street Corp., the Court of Appeals’ interpretation that 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. They also address 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two provisions of the Drug Law Resentencing Act of 2009, a statute enacted to ameliorate some of the effects of the now-repealed "Rockefeller drug laws."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, they 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.