Ordinary justice in extraordinary times: Legal reasoning and the everyday geopolitics of urban displacement

Abstract

This article explores the geopolitics of the everyday through eviction hearings in Germany’s lower district courts. Based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how judges, through routinized legal reasoning, enact powerful spatial decisions in proceedings that often last under 15 minutes. Through three contrasting cases, the paper shows how assessments of responsibility and perceived deservingness shape judicial discretion and produce uneven vulnerabilities to displacement. Far from discrete legal events, these micro-judgments operate as forms of slow violence, incrementally reproducing the structural conditions of financialized housing and urban precarity. Bringing legal geography into conversation with feminist and urban geopolitical scholarship, the article conceptualizes the court as a state apparatus that normalizes and administers tenant–landlord disputes. Here, urban displacement is not only permitted—it is made ordinary. The paper contributes to debates on how legal infrastructures, procedural rhythms, and ordinary decision-making practices shape the political economy and lived geopolitics of urban space.

Introduction

In the quiet halls of Germany’s district courts, an ordinary scene plays out every day: landlords file eviction notices, tenants plead their cases, and judges, robed in black, deliberate. These courts, seemingly mundane, are in fact powerful arbiters of displacement, deciding who stays and who must leave their home. These everyday legal proceedings, shaped by formal rules and personal interpretations, reflect much more than the law in books—they embody law in action, where the lived realities of tenants are often overshadowed by the mechanical application of legal codes (Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Pound, 1910). As Ewick and Silbey (1998) argue in The Common Place of Law, legal reasoning in everyday life is not simply an application of abstract rules but a process deeply embedded in the social worlds of judges, lawyers, and litigants.

But the times are no longer ordinary. The COVID-19 pandemic, along with the ongoing housing crisis, rising inequality, and deepening financialization of housing markets, has turned routine eviction cases into sites of heightened vulnerability and legal contestation (Klosterkamp, 2024). This convergence of crises—health, economic, and housing—has created what Desmond and Gershenson (2016) refer to as “extraordinary times,” when systemic issues become painfully visible in everyday legal decisions. Housing, long recognized as a fundamental social right (Hartman, 1998), has now emerged as the focal point of new conflicts between financialized property markets and the socio-economic vulnerabilities of tenants (Champagne et al., 2023; McElroy and Vergerio, 2022; Polanska, 2023). The pandemic has exposed the fragility of tenant protections, highlighting the vast power imbalance between landlords and tenants, particularly in financialized urban housing markets (Aalbers, 2019; Berner et al., 2015; Fields, 2022; Heeg, 2013).

In these extraordinary times, legal reasoning in district courts reveals the entanglement of law, property, and inequality, as the courts become a battleground for urban displacement and social justice (Blomley, 2009; Klosterkamp, 2024; Mitchell, 2026). As housing has shifted from a lived necessity to a financial asset, courts increasingly confront the tension between these two functions of housing. This paper explores how legal reasoning unfolds in these district courts, where judges navigate between the strictures of the law and the messy realities of life. Drawing on courtroom ethnography, this work reveals how legal reasoning is shaped not only by written statutes but also by the social and economic power dynamics that pervade these spaces (Faria et al., 2020; Gowan, 2002; Klosterkamp, 2023). As Blomley (2009) and Mitchell (2026) remind us, the law is spatial; it is applied and experienced in specific contexts, often reinforcing existing hierarchies of power. In the context of urban displacement, this spatial dimension of law becomes even more pronounced, as eviction proceedings routinely prioritize the property rights of landlords over the socio-economic precarity of tenants (Brickell, 2014; Fields, 2022; Lees and Robinson, 2021).

Through a feminist legal geography lens and by detailing three vignettes, this paper contends that eviction hearings in Germany’s lower district courts are everyday geopolitical encounters where state power is enacted, and urban inequality is reproduced. Legal reasoning in these spaces is not merely technical—it is deeply political, embedded in moral and spatial judgments about who belongs in the city. Building on Cuomo and Brickell’s (2019) notion of “feminist geolegality,” the paper shows how the mundane operations of the law—its tempos, narratives, and discretionary judgments—produce uneven vulnerabilities to displacement through forms of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011; Klosterkamp, 2024) that accumulate across cases and over time.

In this context, courts become key institutional sites where property rights are routinely elevated above lived precarity, rendering the marginalization of tenants—particularly women, migrants, and the working poor—an ordinary feature of judicial practice and norm (see Klosterkamp, 2024). Situating these proceedings within the shifting terrain of post-pandemic urbanism, marked by intensified housing financialization and deepening socio-economic divides (Banabak et al., 2024; Kadi et al., 2022), the paper advances feminist geolegality by demonstrating how legal infrastructures adapt—or fail to adapt—to extraordinary urban conditions. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship in feminist and urban geopolitics by theorizing the courtroom as a key site of mundane territorial governance—where state sovereignty is enacted not through spectacle or border enforcement, but through rapid, routinized decisions that reshape urban from within.

The structure of this paper unfolds as follows: the next section presents a concise literature review that establishes the conceptual framework grounding the analysis, drawing on feminist legal geography, feminist geopolitics, and scholarship on urban crisis. The section that follows outlines the methodological framework, detailing my ethnographic study of eviction proceedings in Germany’s lower district courts. It describes how the research traced legal processes across cities under intensified housing pressure and how the courtroom was approached as a key site of everyday state practice. The subsequent section offers a grounded analysis of three court cases, illustrating how judicial reasoning unfolds through mundane yet consequential decisions that spatially sort and morally evaluate tenants. The analysis then turns to how ordinary legal reasoning uphold territorial logics of property and financialized urban governance, embedding classed, racialized, and gendered assumptions into the routine functioning of the state. The conclusion reflects on the geopolitical implications of these micro-institutional practices, arguing for a rethinking of how law governs space and displacement—not through dramatic legislation or crisis alone, but through the everyday enactments of legality in urban life.

Literature review: Feminist legal geography and feminist geopolitics

Scholarship in feminist legal geography and feminist geopolitics provides an essential foundation for understanding how routine legal practices shape urban displacement. Feminist legal geography demonstrates that the law is never merely textual or abstract, but is produced through situated encounters, institutional cultures, and embodied performances (Billo and Mountz, 2016; Gorman, 2019; Klosterkamp, 2023, 2025). Legal decision-making emerges through habitual gestures, professional norms, and spatial arrangements that reflect and reproduce gendered, racialized, and classed power relations. This perspective builds on longstanding socio-legal work distinguishing “law in books” from “law in action” (Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Pound, 1910), foregrounding how legal actors interpret, prioritize, and enact norms unevenly in their everyday work.

Recent feminist legal geographical scholarship (Cuomo and Brickell, 2019; Faria et al., 2020; Klosterkamp, 2024) extends these insights by turning attention to how legal processes constitute the spatial ordering of social life. Cuomo and Brickell’s (2019) concept of “feminist geolegality” is especially instructive here. It highlights how legal reasoning is always geopolitical in that it mediates relationships between intimate vulnerabilities and broader political-economic structures. Feminist geolegality shows how courts and legal infrastructures serve as “everyday borderlands” where rights, belonging, and citizenship are adjudicated not only through formal doctrine, but also through the affective, embodied, and relational dimensions of legal encounters. Scholars such as Gorman (2019), Faria et al. (2020) and Ramirez et al. (2021) have further emphasized how feminist geolegality reveals the racialized and gendered contours of legal authority, demonstrating how legal processes differentially position subjects as credible, vulnerable, or expendable. Their work underscores the centrality of legal spaces—courtrooms, detention centers, administrative offices—as geopolitical sites where intimate experiences of displacement intersect with multi-scalar dynamics of migration control, austerity, and market governance.

Feminist geopolitics deepens this perspective by demonstrating that geopolitical power is not enacted solely through spectacular state practices such as war, border enforcement, or security interventions, but also through mundane, intimate, and bureaucratic routines that structure everyday life (Conlon, 2011; Fluri and Piedalue, 2017; Hyndman, 2012). From this vantage point, eviction hearings constitute geopolitical encounters because they translate global and national forces—housing financialization, welfare retrenchment, speculative investment—into embodied local consequences (Brickell, 2012). Crucially, feminist geopolitics draws attention to how these processes unfold through what Nixon (2011) terms “slow violence”: forms of harm that are incremental, accretive, and often obscured by institutional procedure (see also: Conlon, 2011; Gorman, 2019; Hyndman, 2012, 2019). In the context of eviction, slow violence operates through legal tempos, discretionary judgments, and the routinized enforcement of property norms that gradually erode tenants’ stability and accumulate across cases over time. Such hearings are therefore intimate sites where geopolitical power is exercised through routine administrative action, producing differentiated vulnerabilities along axes of race, gender, class, and migration status. By foregrounding these everyday enactments of state power, feminist geopolitics highlights why eviction hearings require a multi-scalar analysis: they are simultaneously personal crises, urban governance mechanisms, and manifestations of broader political-economic transformations shaping the contemporary city.

Temenos’s work on urban crisis offers a complementary lens for understanding these dynamics, conceptualizing crisis not as a moment of rupture but as an ongoing condition that is actively governed through everyday bureaucratic practices, policy improvisation, and institutional experimentation (Temenos, 2022). This perspective aligns with scholarship showing how urban crises—whether related to housing, austerity, public health, or welfare retrenchment—are managed through mundane state actions that redistribute vulnerability and reconfigure access to urban space (Banabak et al., 2024; Benfer et al., 2021; Champagne et al., 2023). In this view, crisis becomes a mode of governance rather than an exception, enabling states and municipal institutions to normalize forms of dispossession under the guise of fiscal necessity, efficiency, or legal neutrality. Eviction hearings thus operate as micro-sites where crisis is absorbed and enacted, converting structural pressures into individualized legal outcomes and making the slow violence of displacement appear procedurally inevitable.

Taken together, these strands of feminist legal geography, feminist geopolitics, and urban crisis scholarship reveal why eviction hearings must be understood as geopolitical sites rather than mere administrative procedures. Following scholarship on feminist geopolitics such as Brickell (2012) and Massaro and Williams (2013), the geopolitical is not confined to borders, militarism, or high diplomacy; it is woven through the intimate, the bureaucratic, and the everyday. Courtrooms, in this sense, are not peripheral but central arenas where global forces—financialization, austerity, migration, racial capitalism—are translated into local legal decisions that sort bodies, redistribute vulnerability, and reorganize urban space. Through a multi-scalar lens, eviction hearings appear as points where the global political economy of housing meets the urban crisis of affordability and the intimate politics of survival.

By foregrounding this conceptual terrain before turning to the ethnographic material, the paper argues that eviction cases are geopolitical not simply because they expel people from their homes, but because they operationalize broader territorial logics—legal, economic, and moral—that shape who is permitted to inhabit the contemporary city. Through this framework, the empirical cases that follow are not illustrations of an abstract claim, but concrete demonstrations of how the geopolitical is made and felt through the ordinary, the procedural, and the everyday.

Examining legal reasoning: An ethnography of eviction court cases

To understand how eviction decisions are produced in everyday legal practice, this study adopts courtroom ethnography as its central methodological approach. This perspective moves beyond doctrinal accounts of housing law by examining how legal reasoning emerges through situated interactions among judges, lawyers, and tenants, and how these micro-processes shape the everyday geopolitics of urban displacement. Ethnography, often used to explore the lived experiences of marginalized populations (Katz, 1996; Rose, 2016; Watson and Till, 2018), is particularly suited for understanding how legal reasoning operates in real time and how it interacts with broader socio-spatial dynamics for the urban. By grounding analysis in the ordinary routines and atmospheres of lower district courts, this “studying-up power”-approach (Nader, 1972) captures how “ordinary justice” is enacted through affective, embodied, and institutional dynamics that rarely appear in case files or statutory frameworks (see also: Faria et al., 2020; Walenta, 2020). As a geographer rather than a legal professional—and as a younger woman working in a male-dominated institutional setting—my positionality shaped how legal actors engaged with me; these dual factors often lowered professional defensiveness and enabled judges and lawyers to speak with unusual openness about their routines, constraints, and views on eviction cases. Taken together, my grounded approach, thus reframes eviction hearings not as isolated disputes but as scenes embedded in wider geographies of housing precarity, inequality, and displacement (see for more details: Klosterkamp, 2024, 2025). The following section details the scope of the fieldwork, the practical conditions of access, and the combination of observations, informal conversations, and interviews that inform the analysis.

Over a 36-month period (January 2023–December 2025), I conducted a multi-sided courtroom ethnography (Klosterkamp, 2024; Marcus, 1995) in six different local district courts across Germany–Hamburg, Munich, Berlin and Halle/Leipzig, Cologne and Frankfurt–selected for their high levels of rent pressure and documented patterns of urban displacement. In total, I observed and analyzed more than 250 housing-related hearings, attending court on a weekly to biweekly basis depending on local scheduling. ¹ Because court hearings in Germany are generally open to the public, access was typically straightforward, though occasional restrictions on case files or administrative delays limited deeper procedural insights. During each hearing, I not only produced detailed but also systematically recorded the duration of the proceedings, noted the Streitwerte (monetary value of the dispute), and documented the formal reason for the case, allowing for a more precise comparison of how different types of tenant-landlord disputes were handled. Special focus was given to cases involving Eigenbedarf (personal use) and Mietrückstände (rent arrears), two of the most common legal pathways through with German households experience displacement. This approach enabled close attention to how judges articulated legal reasoning, how lawyers framed narratives of responsibility and entitlement, and how tenant’s voices were positioned—or sidelined—within these exchanges, foregrounding the everyday power asymmetries inherent in the production of “ordinary justice.”

The ethnographic method allows for the analysis of micro-interactions that reveal much about the broader legal structures in which they are embedded (Brickell et al., 2024; Faria et al., 2020; Walenta, 2020). Following in the tradition of legal ethnographies, including Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) The Common Place of Law, I documented the mundane routines of lower-court practice: the pacing of hearings, the embodied habits and interruptions of judges, the narrative strategies of lawyers, and the tensions, pauses, and refusals that marked tenant’s encounters with the state. Attending to these situated performances made visible how legal reasoning is both a technical practice and a socio-spatial process deeply entangled with the wider housing crisis and the everyday geopolitics of urban displacement.

Repeated presence in the courthouses facilitated informal conversations with judges, lawyers, tenants, and bailiffs—encounters that unfolded in waiting rooms, hallways, and transitional spaces between hearings. These informal conversations complemented the formal observations, offering insight into how legal professionals perceive their roles (Berndt, 2010), responsibilities, and constraints within an overstretched housing system. Judges, for example, often framed their work as narrowly bound to legal facts, distancing themselves from the socio-economic conditions of the parties before them—a dynamic well documented in socio-legal scholarship (Sarat and Felstiner, 1995). These interactions also revealed how tenants navigated uncertainty, fear, and intermittent hope as they confronted the possibility of losing their homes, shedding light on the embodied and emotional dimensions of urban displacement at the micro scale of the courtroom (for more details: Klosterkamp, 2025).

To deepen this understanding, I conducted five semi-structured interviews and more than twenty-five informal conversations with key legal actors, including judges, tenant advocates, and bailiffs. These interview situations allowed for more sustained engagement and the possibility of “listening otherwise” (Klosterkamp, 2023; Koch, 2019): following lines of thought that emerged during fieldwork, probing contradictions, and reflecting on institutional pressures shaping eviction cases. Through these interactions, I gained a deeper understanding of the everyday perceptions and biases that shape legal decision-making and how tenants navigate the complex realities of eviction proceedings. Although interviews played a secondary role to observational work, they provided crucial contextualization of professional norms and institutional logics and will contribute to further outputs of the larger project.

Together, this methodological combination—courtroom observation, informal courthouse conversations, and qualitative interviews—provides a layered account of how “ordinary justice” (Ewick and Silbey, 1998) is produced and enacted in everyday legal settings, contributing to the broader literature on legal geography and the socio-spatial dimensions of law (Blomley, 2009; Braverman et al., 2014; Brickell et al., 2024). These real-time observations reveal the mechanics of judicial decision-making and highlight the multiple ways in which the law, in practice, diverges from its theoretical promises.

The following section offers a closer examination of these dynamics through three scenes that illustrate how legal reasoning unfolds in real time and how moments of hope, loss, and contestation are entangled with the structural forces of the housing crisis and the everyday geopolitics of urban displacement.

Entering courts: Legal reasoning and everyday geopolitics in practice

The lower district court may appear unremarkable—an administrative space of beige corridors, stackable chairs, and hurried appointments. Yet within these rooms, profound spatial decisions are made with startling speed. Here, the geopolitics of the everyday unfold not through declarations of sovereignty or dramatic contestations over territory, but through brief legal encounters that determine who may stay in the city and who must leave. Eviction hearings, often scheduled back-to-back in fifteen-minute slots, are moments where the urban order is quietly reshaped under the guise of routine legal administration.

On any given day, the scene unfolds in strikingly similar ways: The waiting room fills with tenants—some visibly distressed, others quietly resigned—awaiting their turn to argue for the right to remain housed. Across from them sit landlords and their legal representatives, prepared with folders of documentation, buoyed by the law’s default alignment with property rights. Judges move swiftly through dockets, interpreting rent arrears (Mietrückstände) and personal use claims (Eigenbedarf) in the language of contract and statute. Yet beneath this bureaucratic choreography lie deeper questions of justice, belonging, and the socio-legal production of urban space.

The weight of precarity: Everyday legalism and the displacement of the sick

On one of these ordinary days, I met Andreas ^* , a middle-aged tenant who, after months of battling long COVID, has fallen behind on his rent. His illness, characterized by chronic fatigue and breathing difficulties, has left him unable to work consistently, he lost his job and as a result, he has struggled to keep up with his rent payments. Andreas stands alone in the courtroom, presenting a letter from his doctor, hoping the judge will understand the debilitating effects of his condition. “I am recovering slowly,” he explains, “but long COVID has made it impossible to maintain my regular work schedule and income.” Despite Andreas’s account of his health struggles, the judge, with a glance at the landlord’s lawyer, does not dwell on his personal difficulties. Instead, the focus quickly shifts to the law—specifically, the tenant’s repeated delays in paying rent. “The law is clear here—the transferal of rent continues to be belated. This is not okay. Please pay in advance rather than always too late,” the judge says. Andreas must pay the arrears within the next 4 weeks, or he will be evicted. The case, lasting less than 8 minutes, leaves Andreas with a four-figure legal bill and the threat of losing his home, despite his ongoing health challenges. ³

In the German context, ² situations like this follow the legal principle of unbeschränkte Vermögenshaftung (unlimited liability of assets) and thus much often form the basis of many eviction cases. While German tenancy laws have historically provided robust protections for tenants, particularly in comparison to other European countries (Banabak et al., 2024; Kadi et al., 2022; Kholodilin et al., 2018), the financialization of housing has gradually eroded these safeguards. Andreas’s case is not isolated but part of a broader pattern wherein legal structures increasingly reflect market imperatives (Berner et al., 2015; Desmond, 2012). Courts, once seen as places of refuge for tenants, now operate as sites where economic rationality reigns supreme. As Latocha (2024) noted, the “right to the city” has been increasingly commodified, and legal reasoning mirrors this shift. The pandemic has made such cases even more complex. As Benfer et al. (2021) argue, evictions during the pandemic were not merely legal disputes but public health crises, with evicted tenants more likely to suffer from COVID-19 due to overcrowded shelters or inadequate living conditions. In Andreas’s case, his COVID-related health vulnerability resonates with the broader precarity faced by tenants during these extraordinary times, when housing stability has become a matter of life and death.

Andreas’s experience is thus emblematic of how extraordinary times affect ordinary justice. As such, this case reveals the limitations of legal reasoning that fails to account for the broader structural inequalities contributing to housing precarity, a central theme in the urban geography of displacement (Lees and Robinson, 2021; Schipper, 2025; Valli, 2015). For urban, legal and political geographers studying displacement, Andreas’s case highlights several key lessons. First, it underscores the role of legal institutions in shaping processes of urban exclusion. The court’s narrow interpretation of the law, which prioritizes rent arrears (Mietrückstände) over Andreas’s health condition, reflects a larger systemic failure to protect vulnerable tenants in times of crisis. This aligns with Mitchell’s (2026) argument about the role of the state in facilitating the accumulation of capital in cities through legal and governance frameworks that favor property owners. The court’s decision reinforces the idea that eviction is not only an economic or legal issue but also a spatial one—where certain groups, particularly low-income tenants, are systematically excluded from high-demand urban spaces.

Second, Andreas’s case illustrates the broader social and political dynamics of urban displacement in Germany, particularly in the context of public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. His experience echoes what many tenants face as the financialization of housing accelerates: they are increasingly vulnerable to market forces that commodify housing and are provided little recourse through legal systems designed to protect property rights first. The case thus demonstrates how socio-legal mechanisms can intensify housing precarity, contributing to the broader displacement of lower-income populations in gentrifying cities. By treating his situation as a mere issue of non-payment, the court overlooked the layered factors that rendered Andreas vulnerable: his illness, his reduced income due to long-term health problems, and his limited ability to navigate Germany’s increasingly competitive rental and job market. This narrow application of the law demonstrates how German courts, even when tenants are visibly vulnerable, prioritize the enforcement of contractual obligations over a more holistic understanding of the tenant’s situation.

When I asked after the hearing whether welfare assistance might have covered the rent, the judge replied, “That is not my job”—a response that revealed a stark detachment between legal procedure and the socio-economic realities tenants face. He added that if it were true that the tenant’s case worker in the welfare department had been unable to process the transfer due to illness, “there would have been other ways to deal with it,” yet stressed that it was not his responsibility to investigate such circumstances. His task, he explained, was simply to determine whether the rent had been paid and to proceed accordingly when it had not. He simultaneously acknowledged that, in theory, welfare support could have been secured and might even have prevented the eviction notice, since the delayed payment was not the tenant’s fault (fieldnotes).

In sum, Andreas’s case is emblematic of the socio-spatial exclusions embedded in legal reasoning, where the enforcement of property rights trumps the protection of tenant rights, even in extraordinary circumstances. It reinforces the argument that displacement is not only the result of market dynamics but is also produced and legitimized through legal processes that fail to account for the lived experiences of vulnerable tenants. His experience underscores the urgent need for rethinking housing policies and legal frameworks to address the socio-economic realities of urban life, making it a crucial point of analysis in the everyday geopolitics of displacement.

Judging by class: The social dynamics of legal reasoning

The courtroom is not just a space of legal deliberation; it is a social space, where class dynamics are laid bare. Consider another case, this time involving Martin*, a well-dressed businessman who owns multiple properties across Germany. Facing financial difficulties due to the pandemic, Martin appears in court to contest the high rent of his apartment. Unlike Andreas, Martin is not alone. He arrives with his legal advisor, confident and articulate. His case, too, is about unpaid rent, but the tone of the hearing is different. The judge listens intently as Martin explains his situation, and what follows is not the swift dismissal Andreas faced. Instead, the conversation shifts toward negotiation. Martin suggests that the rent of one out of a total of four apartments he is currently renting out for his businesses might be too high, and the judge, nodding thoughtfully, agrees to look into the matter. After nearly 45 minutes of discussion, the hearing concludes with a promise to revisit the rent issue. Martin leaves with the assurance that his case will be reconsidered, his eviction temporarily delayed.

The contrast between Andreas’s and Martin’s cases is stark, and it reveals how legal reasoning is shaped by more than just the facts of the case and the application of the law. Martin’s class status, his ability to navigate the legal system, and his polished presentation all influence the way the judge engages with him. While the law may treat all tenants equally in theory, in practice, it becomes clear that the social markers of class, wealth, and education shape the way legal reasoning unfolds in these courtrooms (see also: Desmond and Gershenson, 2016; Lees, 2008; Lees and Robinson, 2021). The notion of law in action, as theorized by Pound (1910), illustrates how legal processes are shaped by social norms. In Martin’s case, class privilege ensures a level of flexibility in judicial decision-making that is not extended to tenants like Andreas. Similarly, critical legal studies have long highlighted the ways in which judicial behavior is influenced by implicit biases related to race, class, and gender (Crenshaw, 1991; Cuomo and Brickell, 2019; Ewick and Silbey, 1998). These biases, although often unconscious, are reflected in the ways judges assess the “worthiness” of tenants based on class cues.

The contrast between Andreas’s and Martin’s cases is not simply a matter of legal interpretation—it is a window into how everyday legal practices are imbued with socio-spatial power. While both men face eviction, their treatment in court diverges sharply, shaped not only by the facts of their cases but by how their bodies, speech, and social positions are read by the judge. Martin’s class privilege—signaled through confident demeanor, legal representation, job position and linguistic fluency in bureaucratic registers—grants him a form of socio-spatial credibility. His claim, though rooted in financial hardship, is mediated through legal reasoning that is flexible, even sympathetic. Andreas, by contrast, arrives alone, visibly ill, and economically vulnerable. The hearing is brief, the judgment swift, and the legal reasoning unyielding.

This disparity illustrates what Pound (1910) famously termed the difference between “law in books” and “law in action,” and underscores how judicial discretion is exercised through social cues, moral judgments, and unspoken assumptions. As Desmond (2012) and Ewick and Silbey (1998) have argued, legal decisions often hinge on implicit evaluations of worthiness, filtered through lenses of class, race, and gender. In the spatial governance of eviction, such biases function geopolitically: they sort bodies in and out of the city, delineating who may remain in urban space and who must be displaced (see for more details: Klosterkamp, 2025). From this perspective, legal reasoning in lower courts becomes a site where state power is territorialized—not through dramatic force, but through the quiet authority of routine, everyday judgment.

Urban geography has long interrogated how class mediates access to and exclusion from urban space, particularly in the context of housing and gentrification (Lees, 2008; Schipper, 2025; Smith, 1987). What Martin’s case illustrates is how legal processes themselves have become instruments through which these class dynamics are spatially enforced. The courtroom, ostensibly a neutral arena for dispute resolution, in fact reproduces uneven urban geographies by affording greater procedural flexibility to those who possess economic and cultural capital. For tenants like Martin, class privilege is not only a buffer against eviction but a mechanism for territorial negotiation—one that can delay displacement, reshape contractual terms, or recalibrate outcomes in their favor. This flexibility is critical in understanding how urban displacement unfolds unevenly across socio-economic lines. While lower-income tenants are quickly displaced when they fall behind on rent (Mietrückstände) or face Eigenbedarf (personal use) claims, wealthier tenants like Martin are more likely to engage in legal negotiations, possibly securing extended terms or reduced payments. This reflects what Slater (2006) refers to as “class privilege in gentrification processes,” where those with economic and social capital can negotiate their place within the changing urban landscape, while others are excluded (see also: Desmond and Gershenson, 2016; Polanska, 2023). In this light, the court hearing is not merely a legal event but a geopolitical act that contributes to the everyday production of urban territory. It delineates the moral and material boundaries of belonging, transforming socio-economic distinctions into spatial consequences.

Martin’s case also underscores the layered and differentiated nature of urban displacement under conditions of financialized gentrification. Unlike Andreas, whose eviction stems from rent arrears and illness-induced precarity, Martin’s legal dispute centers on contesting unaffordable rent increases—reflecting how middle-class tenants are increasingly entangled in the volatility of urban housing markets. In cities such as Munich and Hamburg, even economically stable individuals are squeezed by the rising cost of living, as housing is reconfigured from a social good into an investment asset (Aalbers, 2019; Fields, 2022; Goulding et al., 2023).

Yet Martin’s displacement is qualitatively different. He is not at risk of homelessness or exclusion in the same way as more precarious tenants. His case exemplifies what Easton et al. (2019) term “soft displacement”: a less visible form of urban restructuring that nonetheless reshapes who can afford to remain in desirable urban space. In the courtroom, this stratified experience of urban insecurity is quietly mediated through legal reasoning that recognizes certain forms of distress—financial inconvenience, market fatigue—as more legitimate than others, such as chronic poverty or racialized vulnerability. The geopolitics of the everyday, in this sense, do not only demarcate who is forced to leave, but also how and under what moral framing. Martin’s case thus illustrates that the courtroom is not merely an arena for enforcing legal rights, but a key node in the spatial governance of differentiated displacement. The court thus becomes a site where spatial belonging is adjudicated through the moral economy of property—one that codes middle-class subjects like Martin as legible, deserving, and thus negotiable.

This is not an aberration, but part of a broader pattern in which frontline judicial actors interpret laws through socially inflected lenses. As Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000) show, legal discretion is exercised through everyday assessments of respectability, responsibility, and trustworthiness—proxies for class and social worth that are read off appearance, demeanor, and familiarity with bureaucratic language. In these moments, law becomes a terrain of moral sorting. Tenants like Martin, who embody middle-class markers, are seen as participants in the urban order; tenants like Andreas are not.

This alignment of legal reasoning with classed and racialized assumptions constitutes what Thompson (1971) called a “moral economy”—a structure of feeling through which formal rules are filtered. Judges may not articulate these biases explicitly, but they are inscribed into procedural rhythms and interpretive habits. Legal outcomes thus do more than resolve disputes; they reinforce hierarchies of belonging. Courts become quiet instruments of territorial governance, regulating who is authorized to remain in place and under what terms.

Importantly, Martin’s case points to a spectrum of displacement. Even as middle-class tenants may have the legal means to resist eviction or contest rental increases, they are not immune to the pressures of financialized urbanism (Goulding et al., 2023; Walks, 2013). Here, as everywhere around the globe, the commodification of housing extends displacement beyond the poorest, generating new forms of insecurity and exclusion (Latocha, 2024; Lees and Hubbard, 2022; Olt et al., 2024). As housing is refigured as an investment vehicle rather than a social good, the court participates in adjudicating—and legitimating—these market logics. It disciplines both the margins and the middle, albeit through differentiated legal scripts. For urban geopolitics, attending to these subtler registers of displacement is essential to understanding how legal infrastructures uphold the broader geopolitical architecture of housing precarity.

Finally, Martin’s case draws attention to the need for scholars of urban geopolitics to examine not only the overt displacement of the most vulnerable, but also the quieter, more diffuse forms of exclusion faced by middle-income tenants under financialized regimes of housing. As homes are increasingly treated as investment assets rather than spaces of dwelling, displacement becomes a dispersed and normalized effect of urban governance—felt not only at the margins, but within the urban middle as well (Aalbers, 2019; Madden and Marcuse, 2016; Rolnik, 2019). While individuals like Martin may possess the resources to contest eviction or negotiate legal terms, they remain subject to the territorial logics of speculation and market discipline. Courts, in this context, operate as mundane infrastructures of geopolitical power: they do not merely interpret law, but help administer and legitimize a shifting urban order. As the following case reveals, these dynamics are further intensified when legal reasoning intersects with structural inequalities of race, gender, and aging.

Race and gender: The invisible margins of legal reasoning

If Martin’s case reveals the flexible application of legal norms for the socio-economically privileged, the case of Amina* brings into sharp relief the compounded vulnerabilities faced by those marked by racialized, gendered, and classed difference. I encountered Amina*, an elderly Black woman in her late 60s, who had lived in the same apartment in Hamburg for over 25 years. Her home, situated in a neighborhood that had recently undergone rapid gentrification, had long provided her with stability despite her modest income as a retired caregiver. However, her landlord, a well-established local doctor, was seeking to evict her under the Eigenbedarf (personal use) provision, claiming that his son required the apartment for his own residence.

Amina was not alone; she appeared in court accompanied by a lawyer who presented a detailed defense. Her legal counsel emphasized the multiple layers of disadvantage Amina faced: her low pension, the acute shortage of affordable housing in the city, and the racial discrimination she regularly encountered in the rental market. Several rejected applications for new apartments, particularly following in-person viewings, were presented in court as evidence of this structural exclusion. Yet despite these compelling arguments, the court ruled in favor of the landlord, granting Amina 6 months to vacate the apartment (fieldnotes).

Despite her lawyer’s detailed argumentation and Amina’s evident vulnerability, the court ultimately ruled in favor of the landlord. While the judge acknowledged the duration of Amina’s tenancy and the difficulty she might face in relocating, the decision rested squarely on the legal interpretation of Eigenbedarf. The judge maintained that the landlord’s familial claim to the apartment was legitimate and sufficient for eviction, regardless of the tenant’s circumstances. What stands out in Amina’s case is not just the outcome, but the way her experience of racialized exclusion was rendered legally unintelligible. Though her lawyer presented concrete evidence of repeated rejections from landlords following in-person viewings—suggesting systemic racial discrimination—this was treated as ancillary to the legal question at hand.

Unlike class-based differentiations that may be subtly acknowledged in the courtroom, racial dynamics remain largely unspeakable within the legal frame. This silence is itself geopolitical. It speaks to the infrastructural incapacity—or refusal—of the law to address forms of urban exclusion that do not conform to individualized, documentable harm. The courtroom thus becomes a space where race operates through omission: not through overt hostility, but through bureaucratic neglect and evidentiary erasure. Amina’s case highlights how eviction law not only facilitates displacement in gentrifying cities, but also enacts a politics of invisibility, where the cumulative effects of racialized housing precarity are systematically filtered out of legal relevance.

What can be learned from Amina’s case is how eviction laws—such as Eigenbedarf—can be weaponized to displace long-term tenants in gentrifying urban centers. While designed to allow landlords to reclaim property for personal use, these laws are often applied in ways that disproportionately affect vulnerable groups, whose ability to find alternative housing is severely constrained by structural inequalities. Amina’s case thus highlights how the law can be used as a tool of exclusion, reinforcing the spatial reorganization of cities to benefit property owners while displacing lower-income, racialized tenants. In these moments, the law operates in ways that erase the lived experiences of marginalized tenants, treating their displacement as an inevitable consequence of property ownership rather than a profound social injustice (Brickell, 2014; Lees, 2008).

These racial and gender dynamics of legal reasoning have been well-documented in socio-legal studies (Aiello, 2019; Gorman, 2019; Lees and Hubbard, 2022). Harris (1993) discusses the role of property law in reinforcing racial hierarchies, particularly in the context of historical dispossession and the legacy of racial exclusion from property ownership. Amina’s case echoes this analysis. Her inability to find alternative housing is not only a reflection of her economic precarity but also of the racial discrimination embedded within the housing market. Research by Wyly et al. (2012) shows that Black women, particularly elderly women, are disproportionately affected by evictions, a fact that judicial reasoning often overlooks.

Amina’s case also foregrounds the role of intersectionality in urban displacement processes. As a Black, elderly woman, her experience of eviction was shaped by multiple axes of disadvantage—age, race, and gender—each of which contributed to her vulnerability in the housing market. While feminist economic and legal scholars have long argued for the need to examine how intersecting identities shape access to work places, urban resources and housing (Crenshaw, 1991; Hall, 2022; Shmaryahu-Yeshurun, 2022), Amina’s case provides a clear example of how these dynamics play out in eviction cases, where legal reasoning often overlooks or disregards the compounded challenges faced by individuals who occupy marginalized social positions.

Further, Amina’s case illustrates how “extraordinary times”—marked by growing inequality, demographic shifts, and housing market volatility—intensify existing racialized and gendered vulnerabilities in urban space (Brickell, 2014; Klosterkamp, 2024; Lees and Hubbard, 2022). Her experience, shaped by intersecting social positions as a Black, elderly, low-income woman, underscores how the legal enforcement of property rights can silently reinforce structural disadvantage (see also: Lees and Robinson, 2021). Importantly, examining these dynamics through the site of the courtroom offers a powerful vantage point: it illuminates how legal infrastructures translate broader social hierarchies into spatial outcomes in real time. Amina’s story thus underscores the value of tracing how state power, legality, and moral judgment converge in everyday legal spaces to sort, displace, and reconfigure who has the right to remain in the city.

In this sense, courtroom ethnography strengthens critical urban and geopolitical scholarship by revealing how formal legal processes—however routine or technical—serve as key mechanisms through which urban displacement is enacted and justified. Rather than erasing structural inequalities, the law often renders them procedural.

Unpacking the geopolitical nature of common sense legal reasoning

Eviction hearings in Germany’s lower district courts are rarely dramatic. Yet they are geopolitically consequential. Within 15 minutes on average, judges decide who may remain in the city and who must go—decisions shaped not solely by law but by what Ewick and Silbey (1998) have called the “common sense” of legality. Legal reasoning, far from neutral or purely technical, is saturated with moral assumptions and spatial judgments that reflect prevailing ideologies of ownership, responsibility, and economic worth.

In the German context, these judgments are grounded in a deeply embedded legal culture that upholds property rights as near-absolute, as codified in the German Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB). While Germany has historically been lauded for its tenant protections, including rent regulation and long-term leases, these safeguards are increasingly undermined by housing market financialization and urban restructuring (Holm, 2020; Kholodilin et al., 2018; Schipper, 2025). Judges, in turn, apply the law within a framework that centers on contractual obligations—particularly in cases involving Eigenbedarf (personal use) and Mietrückstände (rent arrears)—often ignoring the socio-economic complexities behind a tenant’s inability to pay (see example 1, Andreas*) or their difficulty relocating in overheated markets (see example 3, Amina*). As Blomley (2009) and Mitchell (2026) argue, such legal minimalism is not apolitical. It is precisely through these routinized refusals that law contributes to urban inequality, legitimizing dispossession under the guise of neutrality.

This narrowing of legal reasoning mirrors a broader shift in urban governance and reflects a broader ideology of neoliberalism, in which housing is framed as a commodity rather than a social right (Hartman, 1998; Rolnik, 2019). According to Christophers (2021), the increasing commodification of urban space has led to a legal culture that views tenants as economic liabilities rather than citizens with legitimate housing needs. The extraordinary times we are living through—marked by a global health crisis, rising unemployment, and escalating housing insecurity—have exposed the limitations of this market-oriented logic. A key concept here is the right to housing, as explored by Rolnik (2019). Rolnik’s work on the global financialization of housing argues that legal systems are increasingly complicit in turning housing into an investment asset. This shift is visible in the legal reasoning used in eviction cases, where the rights of property owners are routinely upheld over the rights of tenants, reflecting a market-driven interpretation of justice. This was evident in Martin*’s case: a middle-class landlord-tenant contesting unaffordable rent. Here, legal reasoning became more flexible, open to negotiation, and reflective of Martin’s perceived reasonableness. His class position enabled a relational reading of the law—one attuned to hardship, but never punitive.

Amina*’s case, by contrast, reveals the limitations of this framework for those at the intersection of racialized and gendered vulnerability. As a Black, elderly woman with a low pension, her claims were procedurally heard but substantively dismissed. The court’s reasoning rested on the legitimacy of the landlord’s personal use claim, not on Amina’s near-impossibility of rehousing. These are not isolated moral failures; they are part of a legal infrastructure that quietly enacts urban dispossession through the adjudication of property claims. The geopolitical significance lies in the way these decisions—made swiftly in low-level courts—structure the right to urban space along lines of race, class, and economic utility.

Seen through this lens, “common sense” legal reasoning constitutes a form of territorial statecraft. It reaffirms the legal and moral boundaries of who belongs in the city and under what terms. Legal institutions, as Nader (1972) and Billo and Mountz (2016) remind us, are not merely reactive—they are constitutive of social order. They produce spatial consequences: not through police violence or legislative spectacle, but through the bureaucratic quiet of everyday adjudication (see also: Ramirez et al., 2021). For tenants like Andreas and Amina, this common sense becomes a barrier to accessing justice. This judicial reasoning not only mirrors but reinforces broader economic structures in which wealth accumulation through property is prioritized over human need.

Moreover, these micro-decisions do not operate in a vacuum. They intersect with broader processes of urban financialization, welfare retrenchment, and demographic polarization (Berner et al., 2015; Heeg, 2013). Courts—particularly at the district level—thus function as mundane but powerful nodes in the governance of displacement. As Blomley (2009) argues, property law is not only about ownership—it is about territory. It creates and maintains spatial boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. In rapidly gentrifying German cities, this means reinforcing the city as a domain for capital and property owners, while marginalizing those whose claims to space are based on longevity, community, or need. In this way, law serves as both a reflection and a reinforcement of the socio-economic inequalities that define extraordinary times.

On a more general note and as Brickell (2012) reminds us, the politics of housing must also be understood through the dual lens of big P and small p politics. This applies to the everyday geopolitics of the courthouse as well: While big P politics refers to the formal institutions, laws, and state mechanisms that regulate housing—such as rent control, eviction law, and welfare policy—small p politics captures the everyday, lived experiences through which power is felt, negotiated, and resisted. In times of extraordinary crisis—be it economic downturns, pandemics, or accelerating housing financialization—this distinction becomes especially salient. Formal state responses may appear neutral or procedural, yet they are always filtered through the micropolitics of moral judgment, social expectation, and structural inequality. These everyday enactments of power determine who is seen as deserving of protection, who is left behind, and how the right to remain in place is spatially distributed. Housing, then, is not only a site of governance but of deeply contested everyday geopolitics, where broader structural crises are absorbed, contested, and reproduced in the ordinary routines of urban life (Brickell, 2012: 576).

This territorial logic of law is central to understanding how urban displacement operates in Germany’s urban centers. By adhering to a “common sense” interpretation of property rights, courts help to maintain urban inequality by legitimizing the displacement of marginalized populations. This process is not limited to individual eviction cases but is part of a broader pattern of urban governance that manages urban space through legal instruments that favor capital accumulation and the concentration of property in the hands of a few (Slater, 2006; Smith, 1987). The cumulative effect of these legal decisions is the production of uneven urban geographies, where access to housing and security is increasingly determined by one’s ability to navigate the legal and market systems that prioritize property ownership.

The “common sense” of law, then, is deeply geopolitical. It is a logic that aligns legality with market rationality, property with legitimacy, and tenancy with precarity. To understand contemporary urban inequality, we must examine how these assumptions are operationalized at the scale of the courtroom—not just as legal texts or policies, but as everyday practices that produce spatial order. If law is, as Ewick and Silbey (1998) suggest, both a resource and a constraint, then the courts are where its geopolitics unfold—quietly, routinely, and with profound consequence.

Conclusion: Everyday legalities, urban displacement, and the geopolitics of the ordinary

This paper has argued that the district court—a seemingly mundane site of everyday governance—functions as a crucial arena in the geopolitics of urban inequality. Through an ethnographic lens on eviction hearings in German district courts, I have shown how legal reasoning, far from being neutral or technocratic, enacts territorial decisions that define who belongs in the city and who can be removed. In moments that last no more than a few minutes, courts adjudicate on matters of housing, health, labor, and dignity—but do so primarily through the narrow contractual logics of Eigenbedarf (personal use) and Mietrückstände (rent arrears). These cases, treated as routine, quietly restructure urban space.

Through close readings of three representative cases—a chronically ill worker evicted due to rent arrears (Andreas*), a long-term Black tenant (Amina*) displaced via a landlord’s claim of personal use (Eigenbedarf), and a property-owning businessman (Martin*) contesting high rent—the paper reveals how these are not simply individual litigants; they represent different positions in the urban order of dispossession and endurance. Their cases show how the courtroom translates broader market pressures—gentrification, financialization, crisis—into legally authorized displacement. This is not exceptional; it is ordinary justice. In line with Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) concept of the “commonplace of law,” judicial decision-making relies on “common sense” interpretations that align with property norms and market rationalities. Yet this everyday legality is profoundly geopolitical: it sorts urban populations, disciplines the poor, and secures the city for capital.

German district courts, particularly in cities with escalating rental markets, are now frontline institutions in the ongoing transformation of housing from social good to financial asset. Their work is spatial and sovereign. In this regard, my findings echo Blomley’s notion (2009) on how property law produces territory—it delineates who gets to stay and under what conditions. In today’s urban political economy, this translates into routine decisions that entrench precarity for some while safeguarding investment for others.

This analysis and it's underlying rich ethnographic details contributes to ongoing debates in critical urban geography and geopolitical scholarship by showing how the micro-practices of judicial reasoning—embodied, local, and bureaucratic—participate in the macro-structuring of urban inequality. It also foregrounds the epistemological and methodological value of studying the law from below: from courtrooms, waiting rooms, and the margins of legal discourse, where power is both quietly enforced and occasionally contested.

Ultimately, any effort to rethink urban justice must contend with law not just as regulation, but as governance—a mechanism that legitimates displacement and stabilizes socio-economic hierarchies in the name of order. The challenge is not merely to reform laws, but to shift the foundational logics of legal reasoning itself: to recognize housing as more than an economic relation, and justice as more than procedural fairness. In extraordinary times, it is precisely in these ordinary spaces that the future of urban belonging is being decided.