Landlord Tenant Law for Family Lawyers

What You’ll Learn:

• Who's Actually Occupying the Property: How to distinguish a tenant, an occupant without rent, a licensee, and an unauthorized occupant, and why the absence of rent alone never settles the question.

• Rights and Duties Attached to Each Status: How landlord-tenant statutes assign rights and duties based on occupant classification, using the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act (URLTA) and real state comparisons to show how the framework plays out.

• Removing an Occupant the Right Way: The difference between unlawful detainer, forcible entry, forcible detainer, and ejectment, and why self-help removal is never an option regardless of who is occupying the property.

• The Shifting Fair Housing Landscape: What changed with HUD's 2025 guidance rescissions and its May 2026 policy on trained assistance animals versus emotional support animals, and what didn't change under the Fair Housing Act itself.