The Human Rights Collegium (HRC) at Queen Mary hosted a special lecture and book launch of The Right to Housing: Law, Concepts, Possibilities by Jessie Hohmann.
Professor Geraldine Van Bueren chaired a panel presentation on the challenges of realising the right to housing, with Dr Jessie Hohmann, Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary, John Gallagher, Principal Solicitor at Shelter and Jamie Burton, Trustee of Just Fair and Barrister, Doughty St Chambers.
Dr Hohmann took up a lectureship with Queen Mary in September 2012, after completing a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. Her new book represents a major contribution to the scholarship on an under-studied and ill-defined right. In terms of content, it provides a much needed exploration of the right to housing. In approach it offers a new framework for argument within which the right to housing, as well as other under-theorised and contested rights, can be reconsidered, reconnecting human rights with the social conditions of their violation, and hence with the reasons for their existence.