Not without a proper appeal. The Appeals Court affirmed a default damages judgment a tenant won against her former landlord, because the landlord’s brief had no record citations or real legal argument and he never supplied the hearing transcript. This is an unpublished Appeals Court decision under Rule 23.0, which courts may cite as persuasive but not as binding precedent.
What happened
The tenant rented a room from the landlord. She brought a case in the Housing Court for various breaches of the landlord’s obligations during her tenancy. At the damages hearing, only the tenant appeared. The judge entered a default judgment and awarded her damages. The landlord then moved for relief from the judgment, claiming the tenant had made misrepresentations to the judge. The judge denied that motion, and the landlord appealed both rulings.
What the court decided
In Nugent v. Baguma, No. 24-P-791 (Mass. App. Ct. May 7, 2025) (Rule 23.0 decision), the court affirmed the default judgment and the order denying relief from judgment.
An appellate brief must state the appellant’s arguments, the reasons for them, and citations to the legal authorities and the parts of the record relied on. Selmark Assocs., Inc. v. Ehrlich, 467 Mass. 525 (2014); Mass. R. A. P. 16. An argument that just asserts error, without real legal argument, does not meet that standard and is waived.
A single justice of the Appeals Court had allowed the landlord to file a brief that did not follow the usual format. But the single justice warned him that this did not excuse him from making proper appellate argument or from filing a record appendix good enough for review. The single justice specifically told him he had not provided the transcript he cited. He did not fix either problem.
On appeal, the landlord argued that the judge got the facts wrong. He claimed the tenant was not lawfully in the property, forged the lease, misled his business partner, and asked him to falsify documents for a rental assistance program. The court could not evaluate any of that. Without a transcript, it had no way to check what the tenant told the judge. And some of his arguments were never raised in his motion for relief from judgment. An issue not raised in the trial court generally cannot be raised for the first time on appeal. Carey v. New England Organ Bank, 446 Mass. 270 (2006).
Because the landlord did not follow the appellate rules, the court held he waived every issue in his appeal. The tenant did not even file a brief, and she still kept her judgment.
What this means for you
If you are a tenant and the landlord ignored your Housing Court case, a default judgment can be a real win. This decision shows that a landlord who skips the hearing cannot simply tell a different story on appeal without a transcript, record citations and real legal argument. The Appeals Court is not a place to retry the facts. It reviews what happened in the trial court, based on the record.
That cuts both ways. Tenants who appeal face the same rules. If you appeal without a transcript, without citations to the record, or with arguments you never made to the trial judge, you can lose without the court ever reaching the merits. A court’s leniency on format does not relieve you of the duty to give the court what it needs to decide the case.
The bigger lesson is to make your record in the trial court. Show up to every hearing. Put your arguments in writing in any post-judgment motion. If something is going to matter on appeal, it needs to be said to the trial judge first.
What to do now
- If you have a default judgment in your favor, get a certified copy of the judgment and ask the clerk about the next steps to collect.
- If you missed a hearing, act fast. Ask a lawyer about a motion to remove the default or for relief from judgment, and raise every reason in that motion.
- If you plan to appeal, order the hearing transcript right away. Without it, the appeals court may not be able to review what happened.
- Cite the record. Every factual claim in a brief should point to a page in the record appendix.
- Read any order from the Appeals Court closely and do what it says by the deadline.
If this is your situation, call Doubleday Law at (617) 575-2006 or tell us what happened. Housing Court deadlines are short.
