New Article: Nicholas Blomley, Alexandra Flynn, Marie-ève Sylvestre, & Nicholas Olson, Law, Urban Space, and Precarious Property: The Governance of Poor People’s Possessions, 50 Fordham Urb. L. J. 223 (2023). Excerpt below:
Law is not abstract and ungrounded, but is formed through, and productive of the spaces in which it exists. Such spaces are not abstract, but inherently social and political. To fully understand the work of legal space, it is necessary to learn from those on the legal margins. The geographies of real property law are, for most of us, taken for granted. The precariously housed, however, are forced to experience only the exclusionary territorialization of private property, without any compensatory right to territory of their own. They live the “Lockean hell”: not simply are they “under the power of others — to be dominated by them or dependent on them — in respect of where one may be,” but also they must negotiate the legal reality that “that there is nowhere that [they] are in charge of, nowhere that everyone else has no right to be without [their] leave.” Jeremy Waldron developed an influential analysis of space and law in this context. He notes that spaces in which the houseless can exercise their freedom, including fundamental freedoms such as the right to sleep without being disturbed by others, are hedged in by the territory of private property: For the most part the homeless are excluded from all the places governed by private property rules, whereas the rest of us are, in the same sense, excluded from all but one (or maybe all but a few) of those places. That is another way of saying that each of us has at least one place to be in a country composed of private places, whereas the homeless person has none. The rules of private property are thus, for the houseless person, “a series of fences that stand between them and somewhere to be, somewhere to act.” While a powerful argument, we offer two supplements.
Poverty Law 