Lorna Fox O'Mahony

The growing use of housing equity to support a range of activities and needs raises complex issues, particularly for older owners. In an environment in which older owners are pushed towards housing equity transactions to meet income and welfare costs, they are required to make choices from a complex and sometimes bewildering range of options. The transactions which facilitate the use of home equity as a resource to spend in later life - from 'trading down' and 'ordinary' secured and unsecured debt to targeted products including reverse/lifetime mortgages, home reversion plans and sale-and-rentback agreements - raise important legal and regulatory issues. This book provides a contextual analysis of the financial transactions that older people enter into using their housing equity. It traces the protections afforded to older owners through the 'ordinary' law of property and contract, as well as the development of specific regulatory protections focused on targeted products. The book employs the notion of risk to highlight the nature and causes of the 'situational' vulnerabilities to which older people are now subject as 'consumers' of housing equity, showing that the older owner's personal situation is crucial in determining whether and why they may seek to release equity, the options and products available to them, and the impact of harms resulting from adverse transactions. The book critically evaluates the extent to which this context is incorporated in the legal frameworks through which these transactions are governed, as a measure of the 'appropriateness' of existing legal provision, as well as considering the arguments surrounding 'special protection' for older owners in housing equity transactions.

Between Risk and Regulation

Home Equity and Ageing Owners

Marc L. Roark

Squatting and the State offers a new theoretical and methodological approach for analyzing state response to squatting, homelessness, empty land, and housing. Embedded in local, national, and transnational contexts, and reaching beyond conventional property theories, this important work sets out a fresh analytical paradigm for understanding the deep, interlocking problems facing not just the traditional 'victims' of narratives about homelessness and squatting but also a variety of other participants in these conflicts. Against the backdrop of economic, social, and political crises, Squatting and the State offers readers important insights about the changing natures of property, investment, housing, communities, and the multi-level state, and describes the implications of these changes for how we think and talk about property in law.

Resilient Property in an Age of Crisis

Squatting and the State

This book offers a fresh theoretical approach and methodology for tackling the most pressing property problems of our time.

It is difficult to overstate the everyday importance of home in law. Home provides the backdrop for our lives, and is often the scene or the subject of legal disputes. In addition, in recent decades there has been growing academic interest in the meaning of home, which has prompted empirical studies and theoretical exploration in a wide range of disciplines. Yet, while the authenticity of home as a social, psychological, cultural and emotional phenomenon has been recognised in other disciplines, it has not penetrated the legal domain, where the proposition that home can encapsulate meanings beyond the physical structure of the house, or the capital value it represents, continues to present conceptual difficulties. This book focuses on the competing interests of creditors who lend money against the security of the property and the occupiers who dwell in the property, in the context of possession actions. By mapping the concept of home as it has evolved in other disciplines against existing legal frameworks, Conceptualising Home examines the possibilities for developing a coherent concept of home in law.

Theories, Laws and Policies

Conceptualising Home

David Cowan

Neil Cobb

An engaging introduction to the more advanced writings on property law, designed to provide the additional insights necessary to excel in the study of the subject.

Great Debates in Property Law

James A. Sweeney

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.

Displacement and Dispossession

The Idea of Home in Law

James Devenney

Mel Kenny

Given the unprecedented recent turmoil on financial markets we now face radically challenged, 'post-Lehmann' assumptions on protecting the vulnerable in financial transactions. This collection of essays explores conceptions of, and responses to, unconscionability and similar notions across Europe with specific reference to financial transactions. It presents a detailed analysis of concepts of unconscionability in Europe against a backdrop of Commission initiatives aimed, variously, at securing a single market in financial services, producing greater coherence in EC consumer protection law and consolidating European private law. This analysis illustrates, for example, that concepts of unconscionability depend on context and can be shaped by a variety of factors. It also illustrates that jurisdictions may choose to respond to questions of unconscionability through a variety of legal instruments located in different branches of the law rather than through a single doctrine. Thus this collection illuminates many of the obstacles facing harmonisation in this area.

Lorna Fox O'Mahony

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