Common Sense Law: Making Rights in the Liberal City

This article, co-authored by encampment and university scholars, is concerned with how homeless persons challenge rightlessness. We do so by advancing a conceptual framework of common sense law, arguing that such contestations take place not only in courtrooms but also in the lived spaces of homelessness. Drawing on five years of ethnography, we foreground how homeless persons become proficient in the law as well as in self-advocacy, navigating and resisting state power, be it the edicts of criminalization or the labyrinth of bureaucratization. In doing so, we seek to understand housing justice as rights from below as well as a process of making right, a form of redress for perceived injuries. Our conceptual framework of common sense law derives from the specificity of the North American context where homeless personhood is constituted both within and against liberal arrangements of property. Often deployed in spaces such as the street, where property arrangements are contested by those consigned to spatial precarity, common sense law is a re-formation of liberalism and its constitutionally protected rights.