Commercial Landlord-Tenant—Law Firm Tenant’s Claims for Partial and Constructive Eviction Rejected, Based on Lease Provision Which Permitted Landlord to Make Repairs Without Any Rent Abatement
A receiver of an office building moved for summary judgment against a respondent law-firm tenant, for the sum of $415,932.30 and to dismiss the tenant’s counterclaims. The tenant asserted affirmative defenses, including actual partial eviction, constructive eviction, that the tenant had been barred and excluded from the parking lot, failure of consideration, that the receiver and its predecessors failed to take reasonable action to prevent damage to the parking garage, which resulted in an improper and illegal actual or partial eviction, that the obligation to pay rent ended when a town “ordered the closing of the…parking lot,” alternatively, that the tenant is “entitled to a rent abatement,” the “statute of frauds, equitable estoppel and unclean hands.”
