Constructive eviction addresses a landlord who never formally evicts a tenant, but whose conduct — or failure to act — makes the premises so unfit that the tenant is effectively forced out. Rather than requiring the tenant to keep paying rent for a space that has been made unlivable, the doctrine treats the landlord's substantial interference as the functional equivalent of a physical eviction, discharging the tenant's further rent obligation once the tenant actually vacates.

The doctrine grew out of the covenant of quiet enjoyment implied in every lease — the landlord's obligation not to interfere with the tenant's use and possession of the premises — and predates the modern implied warranty of habitability, with which it now overlaps substantially in residential leases but remains a distinct theory with its own requirements.

A tenant asserting constructive eviction generally must show substantial interference with the use and enjoyment of the premises attributable to the landlord, meaning a condition the landlord caused or had a duty to remedy and failed to; that the interference was serious enough to render the premises unsuitable for their intended use; and — the requirement that most distinguishes this doctrine — that the tenant actually vacated the premises within a reasonable time after the interference arose.

The requirement to vacate is what makes constructive eviction different from simply withholding rent while staying: a tenant who stays in possession and merely complains about conditions has not been constructively evicted, no matter how bad those conditions are, and generally cannot invoke the doctrine to excuse rent going forward. A tenant who delays too long after the interference arises risks being found to have waived the claim by continuing to treat the lease as in effect.

In residential leases, constructive eviction and the implied warranty of habitability often arise from the same facts — a landlord's failure to fix a serious defect — but they give different remedies. The habitability warranty typically lets a tenant stay in possession and withhold rent, repair-and-deduct, or sue for damages. Constructive eviction requires vacating and terminates the lease itself, which can be the better or worse remedy depending on whether the tenant wants to keep the tenancy.

Juricratic treats the vacate requirement as a hard gating fact in the claim path, distinct from the interference-severity dial: a tenant scenario can score high on interference severity and still fail the claim entirely if the vacate-timing node is set to 'stayed in possession,' which mirrors how courts actually decide these cases and prevents the simulation from awarding a constructive eviction outcome to a tenant who never left.