Squatting and the State

Lorna Fox O'Mahony is Professor of Law at Essex Law School and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex. Her research explores a wide range of property issues using cross-disciplinary methods. She is author or editor of several books, including Conceptualising Home: Theories, Laws and Policies (2006), which was awarded the Society of Legal Scholars' Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (2007). Marc Roark is the Louisiana Outside Counsel of Health and Ethics Endowed Professor of Law at the Southern University Law Center. His is also a Senior Fellow at the Native American Law and Policy Institute at Southern University. He has published widely on issues at the intersection of property, housing, homelessness and identity. He is a member of the EVICT research network and serves on the Advisory Panel for the UNESCO Housing Chair at the Universität Rovira I Virgilli, Tarragona, Spain.

• Introduction Squatters, Scale, and the State; Part I. Squatting and the State: 1. States, narratives, and norms; 2. Squatting and the law; 3. Property theory and the state; 4. Scaling the state; Part II. Resilient Property in an Age of Crises: 5. Resilient property methodology; 6. Possession, pragmatism, and homeless squatting; 7. Ownership and absent owners; 8. Aggregate interests – neighborhoods, markets, and social movements; Part III. Resilient Property in Action: 9. Scaling resilience and the state; 10. Postscript: Resilient property and the pandemic; Bibliography; Index.

'This timely and important book compels us to rethink how law structures property relations between individuals, institutions, and the state. It is a must-read for anyone interested in reforming property law to be more responsive to our collective human need for resilience.' Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W Woodruff Professor of Law, Emory University, Founding Director of the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative