21 September 2025
Balancing Rent Control and Property Rights
Across major European cities, the housing crisis has moved from warning signs to full-scale emergency. As housing production slowed down and public stock was sold off or left to decay, European governments increasingly turned housing over to market forces. To deal with the stark consequences, governments have responded with a familiar tool: rent control. But these interventions raise complex legal questions. How far can states go in regulating the rental market without infringing upon landlords’ constitutional property rights? And what happens when these laws are tested before the courts? Continue reading >>
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20 June 2022
The Rule of Law in a Reign of Terror
India is witnessing a spate of housing demolition used as a tool to inflict extrajudicial punishment for dissent. Over the past few months, the bulldozer has emerged as a powerful metaphor for the brute force of the state and the endless machinations of Hindu supremacists to flatten any difference or diversity they encounter. Tempting as it is, to think of the recent demolitions as a shocking new development, in fact the bulldozer has always been a significant determinant of the contours of space in India. Continue reading >>04 February 2022
Property, Proportionality, and Marginality
On 31 January 2022, the Irish Supreme Court delivered a landmark judgment that collapsed, at least in respect of remedies, a previously rigidly-drawn distinction between the private law rights and the public law obligations of housing authorities. The judgment breaks important new ground in emphasising the underprivileged and marginalised status of the Travelling community, and furthermore, in identifying that status as a factor that could weigh against the granting of an injunctive remedy. Continue reading >>
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12 June 2020
Want a law? Draft one
On Berlin, communizing real-estate behemoths and the power to initiate a law Continue reading >>
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