ABSTRACT
The legal treatment of the family, and therefore of the family home, is typically fragmented between many well-established legal categories: in consequence, different areas of the law treat disputes as to the family home in radically different ways.1 In this part we have considered the trusts law context; but there is also land law2 (including leases and mortgages), family law,3 social security law,4 housing law,5 and so on. Each of these distinct legal categories is founded on distinct norms: the law of trusts is founded primarily on Victorian notions of the family, the law of social security on shorter-term public policy considerations and ideology, family law on a variety of impetuses to do with the welfare and needs of the family members, and so forth. This chapter aims to pull together a range of legal rules relating to the family home so that the law of trusts can be placed in its more general social context.
