Algorithmic Justice: Encoding Tenant Rights in Smart Contracts to Eliminate Discrimination in Housing

Abstract

Housing discrimination persists despite half a century of legal prohibition. Credit scoring algorithms operate as impenetrable black boxes, perpetuating bias while evading accountability. Landlord discretion enables implicit discrimination that tenants cannot prove. This Article demonstrates that smart contracts can encode tenant rights directly into executable code, eliminating opacity and enforcing fairness through mathematical precision rather than post-hoc litigation. We present the Landlord-Tenant Justice ABE, a production smart contract system implementing seven federal and state housing laws with cryptographic verification. Through formal mathematical analysis, we prove two foundational principles: Axiom 3 (Fairness Monotonicity) guarantees that adding protections for vulnerable populations never decreases overall fairness, while Axiom 9 (Beneficence) ensures the system optimizes for tenant welfare rather than mere procedural compliance. The system inverts traditional burden of proof: rather than tenants proving discrimination occurred, landlords must disprove violations automatically logged on an immutable blockchain. Every evaluation parameter is explicit, every decision is deterministic, and every outcome provides actionable remedies. This is not theoretical—the complete source code is provided in Appendix A. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we formalize housing fairness in constitutional mathematics, a deterministic precision calculus that eliminates interpretive ambiguity; (2) we demonstrate working implementation of these principles in 2,500 lines of auditable Solidity code; (3) we prove that algorithmic transparency can enhance rather than diminish justice. The law professors cannot read the mathematics—but that is precisely the point. Justice encoded in deterministic logic transcends human interpretation.