Jonathan Garton is a Professor of Law at the University of Warwick. His main research interests are in the law of trusts, particularly charities, and legal history. His books include The Regulation of Organised Civil Society (Hart 2009), Public Benefit in Charity Law (OUP 2013) and Moffat's Trusts Law (7th ed, CUP 2020).
Professor Garton’s talk is titled "Property Disputes about Leper Houses, Pest Houses and Fever Hospitals" (co-written with Prof Charles Mitchell, UCL)
The paper concerns institutions to house the infectious sick. More particularly, it concerns disputes about control of these institutions and the property dedicated to funding their activities, and some of the effects which resolution of these disputes had on the development of English property law. The institutions in question were not all created for the same purposes, but what they had in common was that their activities took place inside physical structures built on land and they were often intended to last a long time.
As a practical matter, property rights in the land were therefore needed, and frequently other property was also needed to provide an income to pay for the institutions’ activities. Some recurring questions therefore arose: for what length of time could property be dedicated to pursuit of an institution’s purposes; who was responsible for ensuring that these were carried out; and what should happen if the property were misapplied, or if the purposes became redundant, or if their pursuit compromised other people’s enjoyment of their own property? They also raise a broader question, that goes to the very nature of ownership, of the extent to which an owner’s dominion can be subordinated to the public interest. The paper explores these issues in the context of medieval leper houses, early modern pest houses and Victorian fever hospitals, and suggests a shift in attitude across the centuries as the importance of secure property rights increasingly came to be recognised as a pre-requisite for social stability and economic growth