The Idea of Home in Law: Displacement and Dispossession

The Idea of Home in Law: Displacement and Dispossession explores an important set of legal and policy issues surrounding the concepts of home and homelessness, taking a growing area of legal scholarship into the new arena of human rights and international law. The collection considers the ideas concerning home - both in the sense of the dwelling place as a special type of property, and territorial claims to homeland - which underpin many contemporary legal problems, by examining a range of contexts where people are displaced or dispossessed from their homes. The essays focusing on dispossession consider themes ranging from mortgage and rent arrears in the UK to responses to the foreclosure crisis in the USA, and from eviction for the purposes of economic development in South Africa to the exclusion of asylum seekers from the UK's social housing and welfare provision, and within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights. The displacement theme, meanwhile, examines transnational 'home' issues from the experiences of exiles and refugees in areas of conflict to the impact of the broader context of economic, social and cultural rights on attempts to protect housing and home through international law. At the heart of each essay the contributors, experts from across the fields of law, policy, and housing rights, examine the circumstances in which displacement and dispossession take place, and reconsider how law and policy respond to such circumstances with a particular focus on the impact of loss of home for the human person. At a time of particular and increasing concern about security of tenure and the role of law and policy in protecting people who are vulnerable to forced eviction, The Idea of Home in Law presents a bold opportunity to raise questions about the 'rights' and norms associated with housing and home, and to generate new insights for scholarship and for national and international policy debates concerning displacement and dispossession.

Lorna Fox O'Mahony is Professor of Law at the University of Durham, author of Conceptualising Home: Theories, Laws and Policies (Hart, 2006) and co-editor of Unconscionability in European Private Financial Transactions: Protecting the Vulnerable (Cambridge University Press, 2009). James A. Sweeney is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Durham, where his work focuses on human rights and refugee law. He is the author of The European Convention on Human Rights and Its New Contracting Parties: Democratic Transition and Consolidation in the European Jurisprudence (Routledge/Cavendish, forthcoming 2010).