Limiting Mortgagors’ Liability and Questioning the Obligation to Repay

Abstract

This article addresses different approaches to the spate of home repossessions experienced in Spain after the burst of the housing bubble in 2008. It considers the diverging ways in which various involved actors – legislators setting regulatory frameworks, debt advisors from governmental and non-governmental agencies, judges ruling on repossession procedures, anti-repossession movements advocating debt refusal and the ‘self-defence’ of the right to housing – have reacted to the housing crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork developed in the Barcelona metropolitan area, the article considers that a vindicatory approach, one that incorporates moral ideas of justice, informed some of these diverging reactions over and against the orthodox stance that the obligation to repay is absolute. The vindicatory understanding of justice advocates favouring debtors by taking into account their new circumstances and repairing the social harm inflicted on them.