I have been writing about housing law for too long to remember.\u00a0 It’s my passion.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Its not a precisely academic thing to do, though, because once the subject’s parameters are questioned, that has implications for the devolution settlement.\u00a0 If there is no such thing as “housing law”, that is not exactly helpful for policy-makers in Wales.<\/p>\n
Let me make my case anyway.\u00a0I 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.\u00a0 And, the history of housing law is quite interesting.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One such issue was landlord and tenant law, what used to be called leasehold law.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Martin Partington’s co-authored text with the barrister, Andrew Arden, is possibly the first book which was called\u00a0Housing Law<\/em>, and sought to define its subject.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 All of these crafted the subject.\u00a0 But, its actual content reflected perhaps the kind of work that was being done in law centres etc.\u00a0 At least, that’s what I think.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n But, it does not have an objective existence as such beyond its creation in that way.\u00a0 It does not work around a contract or a tort or that sort of thing.\u00a0 It doesn’t really belong in the curriculum as such, perhaps.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n