This book explores an important set of legal and policy issues surrounding the concepts of home and homelessness, taking this growing area of legal scholarship into the new arena of human rights and international law. 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.

Contents: The idea of home in law: displacement and dispossession, Lorna Fox O'Mahony and James A. Sweeney; Dispossession for arrears: the weight of home in English law, Susan Bright; Home as ownership, dispossession as foreclosure: the impact of the current crisis on the American model of 'home', Reshmi Dyal-Chand; Housing rights in the intersection between expropriation and eviction law, A.J. van der Walt; The displacement and dispossession of asylum seekers: recalibrating the legal perspective, James A. Sweeney and Lorna Fox O'Mahony; Can international housing rights based on public international law really impact on contemporary housing systems?, Padraic Kenna; The international law rights to home and homeland, Susan Breau; Loss of the home during armed conflict: ECHR case law on destruction, eviction and denial of access, Antoine Buyse; Re-thinking responses to displacement and dispossession, Lorna Fox O'Mahony and James A. Sweeney; Index.

Lorna Fox O'Mahony is Professor of Law at the University of Durham, author of Conceptualising Home: Theories, Laws and Policies (Hart, 2006) and co-editor of Unconscionability in European Private Financial Transactions: Protecting the Vulnerable (Cambridge University Press, 2009). James A. Sweeney is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Durham, where his work focuses on human rights and refugee law. He is the author of The European Convention on Human Rights and Its New Contracting Parties: Democratic Transition and Consolidation in the European Jurisprudence (Routledge/Cavendish, forthcoming 2010).