Legal Unhousing: Power, Rights, and Housing Precarity

Legal Unhousing exposes the often unseen ways in which legal processes work to remove people from their homes.

A growing number of people in Canada face difficulty in finding and keeping adequate, affordable accommodation. Anna Lund and Sarah Buhler have assembled a superb group of scholars to investigate the concept of unhousing across a wide variety of legal fields: residential tenancies, human rights, municipal planning, mortgage enforcement and securitization, Aboriginal law, disability rights, prison administration, and judgment enforcement. Their findings reveal that the law can be a powerful force of expulsion and dispossession.

At the same time, contributors offer rich evidence of resistance to legal unhousing. They illuminate how creative legal practices can assert housing as a human right by emphasizing the links between a stable, satisfactory place to live and people’s well-being, dignity, and humanity. This compassionate study reinforces a fundamental shared truth: there’s no place like home. It emphasizes that law can play a role in ensuring that every person has a home.

Anna Jane Samis Lund holds the F.R. (Dick) Matthews Professorship in Business Law at the University of Alberta. She practices law on a pro bono basis through the Edmonton Community Legal Centre. She is the author of Trustees at Work: Financial Pressures, Emotional Labour, and Canadian Bankruptcy Law and, with Sandeep K. Dhir, Collections Law in Alberta: A Practical Guide.

Sarah Buhler is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law and a member of the Law Society of Saskatchewan. She is the recipient of several research, scholarship, and teaching awards and is the author, with Sarah Marsden and Gemma Smyth, of Clinical Law: Practice, Theory, and Social Justice Advocacy.