About
Dean is Lecturer in Law at Southampton Law School where he teaches a range of subjects on the LLB, and researches within the private law areas of property and trusts law. Dean is also a member of the Centre for People and Property based within the Law School.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Property & Land law
- Housing law and its policies/regulation in the welfare and neoliberal states
- Equity and the law of trusts
- Company law
- Family law (matrimonial finance and property)
Publications
Teaching
Dean currently teaches across the LLB programme at all levels. He teaches on the compulsory first-year Legal Systems and Reasoning module; compulsory second-year Land Law and Equity & Trusts modules; and final-year elective Company Law module.
Dean is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Dean is currently completing his PhD thesis (under the supervision of Professor Helen Carr) which examines the phenomenon of property guardianship. Property guardianship originated in the Netherlands and has since been used as a ‘meanwhile’, transient form of housing in urban areas within England where the private rented sector has proved too expensive for individuals.
The concept has recently attracted legal attention and an emergent jurisprudence raises several questions which the thesis explores. The case law raises critical doctrinal questions about the meaning of ownership and possession and how the contemporary landscape compares to the application of these foundational principles in comparable transient housing. This is particularly so in light of some seminal cases in the residential accommodation context in the late-20th century.
Property guardianship also involves the triangulation of housing, property and contract law and the thesis asks questions around the sociology of these areas and how this is evolving. The thesis also explores how property guardianship and property law shape the vacant and how this is all being played out in the neoliberal state.
To date, Dean has had published a series of articles analysing the court decisions in the Journal of Housing Law, and forthcoming in the Northern Ireland Law Quarterly.