Doctoral Dissertation Research: Property, Law, and Markets

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines how markets in a post-financial crisis economy are remade through legal interventions and how, when mortgages are the key object for intervening, local understandings of property impact those interventions. The project focuses on property repossessions, examining, in particular, the role of local courts. Courts are a key local stage where new property relations are contested and authorized. While lenders may take courts for granted as rubber stamps for repossessions, judges and registrars may hesitate to repossess homes. Exploring emerging practices and theories of law and economy in the context of property repossessions, the research asks how formal legal institutions and players define property, property rights, and legal responsibility. The project also examines lay understandings of property, asking how homeowners and business owners define property and respond to repossessions. In addition to advancing knowledge on the interplay between law, markets, courts, and the economy, this project has broader impacts that include graduate student training. The rural Irish border region serves as the site for the research project. The Irish border counties, where formal law and markets have often had to coexist with significant shadow organizations and economies, have become a dynamic area where North American hedge fund investors have bought thousands of defaulting mortgages from Ireland?s weakened financial institutions, and where rural homeowners contest them in the courts with defenses that appeal to "sovereign citizen" discourse. The research will use ethnographic field methods of participant observation, direct observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival research to analyze how the economic recovery practically unwinds at the local level and in the context of bureaucratic registration, court proceedings, and actual repossessions.