ABSTRACT
The following summary sets out the main themes in the English law relating to trusts of homes:
14.1 INTRODUCTION
14.1.1 Understanding the legal treatment of the home
There can be few more psychologically-loaded concepts than that of the home. As the anthropology of property law, and indeed the whole sweep of human history, demonstrates, there are few things more important to human beings than land. The means by which access to land and protection of rights to use land are provided constitute a central part of all world cultures. Under English law the legal treatment of trusts of land, specifically in relation to family homes, is particularly vexed: so much so that the subject commands its own individual treatment in Part 5. The treatment of the family home is clearly of enormous sociological, political, economic, spiritual and psychological importance in any system of law-that is quite a list. In any situation in which more than one person occupies a home, there will be an issue as to the equitable and common law rights in that property.
