CLP Public Land Law

10 October 2024, 1:00 pm-2:00 pm
This lecture was delivered by Professor Antonia Layard, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2024-25
Speaker: Prof Antonia Layard (University of Oxford)
Chair: Prof Sarah Blandy (University of Sheffield)
About the lecture
Land law is often said to be a private law subject, focused on the ordering of relationships between individual parties: a landlord and tenant, vendor and purchaser or lender and borrower. Today English and Welsh land law scholarship and teaching also includes a public law aspect, focusing on the relationship between the individual and the state, notably the protection of rights related to a ‘home’ under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and ‘possessions’ under Article 1 of the Convention’s First Protocol. Yet other than these human rights frameworks, the public interest in land is rarely analysed. This gap forms the focus for this lecture, which considers the impact of rules enacted for planning, nature conservation, heritage protection, access (including footpaths and right to roam), leasehold enfranchisement and compulsory purchase. These restrictions on land use have implications for how we understand constitutional and administrative land law, the distinction between land and other forms of property as well as theories of ownership. The lecture suggests that by incorporating public land law into modern land law scholarship and teaching, we can enrich our understanding of land law, both public and private.
About the Speaker
Professor Antonia Layard is the Wai Chi and Stephen Man Tutor and Fellow in Law at St. Anne’s College, Oxford and a Professor in the Oxford Law Faculty, where she teaches Land Law, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Regulation as well as a seminar on Feminist Public Space. Antonia has research interests in planning, environmental and property law as well as in urban governance and legal geography. Antonia is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an Academic Member of both the AHRC and ESRC Peer Review Colleges. She has undertaken a number of collaborative research projects particularly in relation to localism, children, public space, buses, just transition and everyday nature, funded by the AHRC, the ESRC and the British Academy.
About Current Legal Problems
The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.