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Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

Not a lawyer, but that sure sounds shady as hell. Where I live student housing, even in a dorm, is subject to normal tenancy laws - meaning eviction requires long notice etc. Even saying to someone they need to vacate their home in less than a week could turn out very expensive for the landlord in court.

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MIT has an office of the general counsel and a baker's dozen of high qualified and experienced attorneys (not including supporting staff).

It is possible they are violating the law, but it's probably worth assuming they aren't and understanding why. It may be related to the MA governor declaring a state of emergency a couple of hours ago.

People are too quick to try to apply law governing private parties to governments and other similar institutions. Schools and universities can do a lot of things differently than, say, a private company can.

MIT is a private university, not public.

That is, to a large degree, a distinction without a difference. Large US research universities are more similar than different in most aspects including status as legal entity and (perhaps more important in practice) in how society sees them.

Doesn't matter. Universities generally are governed by specific laws.

Yeah people make the mistake of thinking your can figure out the law based on deduction and first principals. You can't you need to be familiar with applicable case law.

Thing to remember law predates science by about 3000 years.

> Thing to remember law predates science by about 3000 years.

Does it really?

Yes it does. Science as we know it really only dates back to the enlightenment, whereas law dates back to at least 1754 BC (and likely earlier).

More specifically, computer science only dates back a few decades (being generous, call it a century), and most of the people applying incorrect frameworks to law on this site are coming in with preconceived notions from that.

Why should they be above the law?

They're not above the laws that apply to them.

This is pure crony capitalism.

On the contrary, universities as a whole are much older than modern capitalism.

But anyway, I'm not interested in having a normative discussion as to whether there should be separate laws governing institutions of learning. The fact of the matter is that there are, and have been for a very long time, and that doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon. I'm not the one that made it that way and I don't care enough to argue it with you.

They could always ask the state to declare a quarantine and boot everyone out. Quarantine powers in an emergency are extremely broad.

do you live in the US? getting kicked out of housing is usually a major stick that colleges use to enforce disciplinary codes. at my school, the first serious offense would result in being kicked from one dorm to another (I guess to separate you from your network of troublemakers?). after enough strikes, you would be kicked out of campus housing altogether (if not suspended/expelled). iirc, they would usually give about a week's notice if you were only being kicked out of the dorm, or a bit more if you had to find off-campus housing. definitely no full month's notice or drawn out eviction process.

I live in Finland. The student union is the body which owns the student housing and acts as the landlord around here. When the landlord normally resigns the rental agreement, the minimum notice period is six months.

I'm a college student in Massachusetts (but not Cambridge). We don't have a normal lease because we're in a "boarding house". This means that the school has the right to kick us out if we cease to be a student (e.g. expelled) which is useful when roommates need to be relocated if there's any violent incidents.

I imagine in case of the safety of the habitation there probably would be exceptions made. You know, an emergency or crisis of some kind. An act of god. I would imagine that if this went to court and the laws had a carve-out for that...

Anyone with legal knowledge of MA willing to chime in on this?

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