Housing Law Is Dead. Long Live European Housing Law?

Abstract

The U.K. discipline of housing law is closely linked to the advice needs of individuals and local councils who have many housing responsibilities. This interdisciplinary study supports people in need of housing, particularly assisting access to social housing, often owned by councils. In France similar groups are supported by a strongly expressed right to housing, which is a principle of constitutional value. However, the French local government is too small and fragmented to support U.K.-type responsibility and stronger rights of other local people can block access to social housing. European influences mean that the U.K. has imported a series of ideas that could mean less access to social housing for people in need and the U.K. discipline of housing law is more complex, diffused, and difficult to promote as a study unit. French legal study suggests European trends: primarily public law, not empirical and oriented to construction, although this is improving. Several ideas for new European legal subject groupings are suggested, particularly rights. The right to housing might be currently ineffective in France but it is unavoidable because of pervasive European use. The discipline of the U.K. housing law is threatened, but such lawyers could create new disciplines adapting its traditional strengths to new European groupings.