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Jessie Hohmann is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and holds a Junior Research Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge. She will spend several weeks in March 2010 as a Parsons Visitor at the University of Sydney Faculty of Law, Sydney Australia.
Jessie’s research focuses on human rights and the normative limits of international law, investigating how human rights push at the limits of the international legal system and the implications of these pressures for international law. She lectures on the LLM human rights courses at both Cambridge and King’s College London.
Previously, Jessie completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge on ‘The Right to Housing: Theoretical and Practical Possibilities.’ She also holds a LLM from the University of Sydney, a LLB from Osgoode Hall (York University) and a BA from the University of Guelph. She is a barrister and solicitor of the Law Society of Upper Canada and was previously Associate Lecturer at Macquarie University.
Jessie’s publications include the forthcoming ‘Visions of Social Transformation and the Invocation of Human Rights in Mumbai: The Struggle for the Right to Housing’ 13 Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal (2010) and the recently published ‘Igloo as Icon: A Human Rights Approach to Climate Change for the Inuit?’ (2009) 18(2) Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems 297..
Lecture summary:
The right to housing is included in the ‘international bill of rights,’ regional human rights treaties, and the national constitutions of a significant number of states. Nevertheless, the right remains vague and under-theorized.
In this presentation, I will evaluate the right to housing in key international and domestic regimes. The analysis reveals a right that is unexamined in important ways. First, its normative content has only recently begun to be fleshed out by courts and monitoring bodies. The resulting interpretive statements and judicial decisions leave the right to housing without a clear definition. Second, the theoretical justification for (or basis of) the right remains unclear, such that interpretation of the right often appears divorced from the violations it might be expected to redress.
I will offer a close analysis of the legal interpretation of the right, thus evaluating the current state of the law in the legal regimes discussed, followed by an evaluation in a more philosophical sense, assessing the right to housing’s potential to address the homelessness, marginalisation and deprivation that characterize its violation.
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