The Impact of the International Right to Housing on National Legal Discourse: Using Data Science Techniques to Analyse Eviction Litigation

Project Information

EVICT

Grant agreement ID: 949316

DOI

10.3030/949316

Project closed

EC signature date 13 November 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 018,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 018,00

Coordinated by

RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EVICT (The Impact of the International Right to Housing on National Legal Discourse: Using Data Science Techniques to Analyse Eviction Litigation)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

EVICT researches the impact of the human right to adequate housing with the help of legal research and data science.. Eviction – the involuntary loss of one’s home – has a devastating impact on people’s wellbeing and severe consequences for society as a whole. The past financial crisis (2007-2011) and current housing crisis have revealed that these expulsions are a major feature of the contemporary global economy. The project aims to achieve five objectives. First, it will conceptualise the international right to housing by analysing this right as a loosely associated network of housing rights, as codified in or implied by international and European treaties, case law, and the decisions of international and European official bodies and committees. Second, EVICT will determine and explain the impact, or lack thereof, of the international right to housing on national legal and judicial discourses by collecting and analysing data on citations of international case law used in national case law, extracting and assessing data on arguments used by parties/courts in case law, and examining the power of particular normative arguments used in the data. Third, it identifies and explains the predictors of judicial decision-making in national eviction litigation by applying ML techniques, and assess whether these predictors can be linked to the right to housing discours. It also explores how data science methods used in EVICT can be used in other areas of the legal discipline. EVICT will share the collected corpora of legal data on an open access data hub (www.eviction.eu).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The EVICT project teams has analysed the right to adequate housing in various treaties. EVICT researchers have applied doctrinal analysis, systematic content analysis, citation network analysis and empirical normative analysis to data on the right to adequate housing in the ICESCR, CRC, ECHR, RESC and EU law. They have organised over 15 EVICT Talks. These are online talks in which prominent speakers discuss a topic related to evictions, the right to housing, housing law, the (complex) relation between international law and national law, and/or data science. The EVICT researchers have applied doctrinal analysis, systematic content analysis and citation network analysis to data on the right to adequate housing in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain. The team has also included an analysis of the impact of the right to housing in Ireland and other countries (e.g. based on an analysis of Tenlaw reports). Moreover, the EVICT team has analysed Dutch case law with the help of citation analysis and machine learning. Lastly, the team has set up the Scientific Network on Eviction and Housing Research (SNEHR), a network that aims to create a worldwide community of scholars from legal and other disciplines who work on the legal, social and humanitarian aspects of evictions, housing law, housing rights and homelessness

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

EVICT goes far beyond the current state of the art in quantitative legal research methodology, significantly broadening the current academic work on ML in the legal discipline and, among other things, possibilities to identify and explain predictors of the outcome of court cases. The project delivers an empirically rich contribution to the right-to-housing and housing law theories, legal research methodology as well as theories dealing with the interaction between international human rights and national law, as well discourses on the divide between public/private law, property and contract theory, and theories about judicial dialogue, activism, and resistance.

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