ISSUE VII: TRESPASSDeadline: February 6 2023 I was 16 years old when I first trespassed onto some railway tracks and write the initials of the graffiti crew (of which I was the only member) on a wall. Afterwards the most incredible thing happened – absolutely nothing....
As I sat down to write this piece on some of the less credited and understood sonorous movements in the UK and their affecting encounters with law, snippets of David Cameron’s pronouncements on ‘blitzing poverty’ and ‘bulldozing the UK’s worst sink estates’ transmute...
FIRST LETTER (New York on July 12th 2012) /// Dear Lucy, I read your essay Archiving Burroughs: Interzone, Law, Self-Medication with attention and appreciated, as usual, the way you manage to link narrative, law and space all together. I do think however that we...
On Thursday 17 October the community of Buckfastleigh, South Devon, heard the fate of their town, their livelihoods, the protection of their immediate environment and surrounding ecosystems, presented to them in the much awaited decision of a planning appeal...
If you see a house, take it and let the law do its damnedest. (Dworkin 1988, 13) This seminar has been put together at a timely juncture to interrogate the changing landscapes of property and law within legislation, within buildings, within history, within...
As of 1 September 2012, under Section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (“LASPOA”), it became illegal in England and Wales to squat a residential building. Despite the fact that displacing someone from a building that had obvious signs of being their home without the permission of the legal owner has been illegal since the Criminal Law Act 1977, the necessity for a duplicate law just goes to demonstrate the accelerated deification and reification of individual property rights, over the social utility and sharing of resources held within the philosophy and practice of squatting. This recent shift in media-aggravated legislative change is a definitive move further in favour of the landowner as opposed to those who have no land, and those who support the redistribution of land.
William S Burroughs (1914-1997), is one of the most influential, and yet much maligned writers of the Twentieth Century. He has been described by critical legal theorist Nathan Moore as, "... one of the most fundamental diagnosticians of the 20th century [in] the role...
Despite the attempts of Tory backbenchers to delegitimize squatting, and divide it from the issue of homelessness, the two remain inextricably linked: un-met housing needs, a supply of empty property, and squatting, go hand in hand in hand. But that’s about as far as...
This piece was originally written for and presented at the Disobedience Workshop (20–21 May 2011) at the School of Law, Birkbeck College. Since putting together my abstract a few months ago, there have been some alterations and additions and analogies that have...
I recently returned from a three month fellowship in the kaleidoscopic nation that is Indonesia. I undertook research with non-governmental organisation ICRAF (World Agroforestry Centre), analysing their ‘rewards’ (Payments for Environmental Services or ‘PES’) schemes...