Housing Law: An academic “take” (with consequences)

I have been writing about housing law for too long to remember.  It’s my passion.  But, recently, in working with a range of different colleagues, and in my more textbooky work on the subject, I have been questioning its parameters.  This is a rather academic thing to do – my current position is that there is no such thing as “housing law” – in the sense that questioning boundaries is what we do.  This is a kind of a heads up for the book on which I am about to start writing, with my colleague/friend/all-round star, Alex Marsh.  Its not a precisely academic thing to do, though, because once the subject’s parameters are questioned, that has implications for the devolution settlement.  If there is no such thing as “housing law”, that is not exactly helpful for policy-makers in Wales.

Let me make my case anyway. I am influenced particularly by scholars who look back at the history of their subject and ask how it came to be what it is today.  And, the history of housing law is quite interesting.  It seems to have come about as a subject of study during the 1970s at a time when the Law School was “finding” its social side; no longer was its primary mission preparing students for practice.  Its mission, tied up with the founding of the Law Centre movement, came to be seen differently as preparing students to identify issues in society.  One such issue was landlord and tenant law, what used to be called leasehold law.  Martin Partington’s brilliant early Law in Context book on the subject defined its importance and brought together the range of issues which were presented in a more interdisciplinary way.

Martin Partington’s co-authored text with the barrister, Andrew Arden, is possibly the first book which was called Housing Law, and sought to define its subject.  That was followed by the Housing Law Reports, the Encyclopaedia, and other interventions – in particular David Hoath’s wonderful little book and David Hughes’s interventions.  All of these crafted the subject.  But, its actual content reflected perhaps the kind of work that was being done in law centres etc.  At least, that’s what I think.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that – it’s certainly not a criticism – but, as an academic subject, it leads to it perhaps lacking a core.

But, it does not have an objective existence as such beyond its creation in that way.  It does not work around a contract or a tort or that sort of thing.  It doesn’t really belong in the curriculum as such, perhaps.  It is a “destination subject” – a subject which we have to bring a range of different subjects to understand (contract, tort, public law, statutory interpretation, restitution etc etc).  It is also a destination subject – to me, at any rate, as a socio-legal academic – because it engages and embraces different ways of thinking interdisciplinarily.

If you want to read more about these ideas, they were sketched out by myself and Sally Wheeler in a chapter on the sociology of housing law, in Jiri Priban’s edited collection.  I don’t want to bore you here.

In our book, Alex and I are going to argue that what lies behind the subject are a series of important themes.  We are in the process of devising those, but I think it is important to remember that these themes change over time.  The way in which we express those themes today is very different from how they were expressed (for example) 10 or 15 years ago.

And, you might say: that’s all very interesting, Dave, for your readership of one.  But, it really does matter in all sorts of different ways.  It is worth arguing about those themes certainly (and I hope we will).  But, I have had arguments with people about whether some things are housing or land/property law etc.  That is where boundary issues really matter.  So, while Alex and I will be fleshing out our themes and scratching our heads, my sense is that there are bigger issues at stake here.