Contract Law and the Right to Housing – An Introduction

This article introduces the Special Issue ‘Contract Law and the Right to Housing’, which explores how contract law is increasingly implicated in addressing the housing crisis in Europe and beyond. For a long time, housing policy was framed mainly through the lens of public law, relegating private law – and especially contract law – to a subordinate position. Yet the right to housing, articulated in national, European, and international frameworks and mobilized by courts and social movements, reveals contract law’s structural role in shaping access, affordability, and security of tenure in housing markets. The article situates this emerging right within the broader trajectory of the ‘constitutionalization’ of private law, arguing that it represents a distinctive and novel mode of giving fundamental rights effects in private law and legal thought. Shaped against the backdrop of housing’s commodification and financialization, the right to housing engages firmly with the legal infrastructure of housing provision. In doing so, it brings into focus the ways in which contract law and theory are implicated in the structural drivers of the housing crisis and encourages a more contextual understanding of housing markets, attentive to the plurality of actors, institutions, and distributive mechanisms. The contributions gathered in this Special Issue collectively demonstrate how housing is becoming a laboratory for rethinking the foundations and social orientation of contract law.