In Semayne’s Case of 1604, the Court of King’s Bench considered when officers could enter a private house. The judge and law reporter Sir Edward Coke recorded the principle that “the house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose.”
The saying “An Englishman’s home is his castle” is still in everyday use.
In 1997, in Investors Compensation Scheme v West Bromwich Building Society, Lord Hoffmann set out how English courts read contracts. The question is “the meaning which the document would convey to a reasonable person having all the background knowledge” available to the parties.
In 2015, in Arnold v Britton, the Supreme Court set a limit. Leases of holiday chalets fixed a service charge that rose by 10 percent a year over 99 years. The court enforced the clauses as written. It said that commercial common sense must not undervalue the language of a contract, and that it is not the court’s role to relieve a party of the consequences of an unwise bargain.
In England and Wales, an accepted offer on a house is not binding until contracts are exchanged. Until then, the seller may accept a higher offer from someone else. This is called gazumping, and it is not illegal.
Estate agents must pass every offer to the seller, even after one has been accepted. Buyers can ask for the property to be marked “under offer” or “sold subject to contract.”
In 1937, High Trees House leased a block of flats in Battersea from Central London Property Trust at £2,500 a year. The war emptied many flats, and in January 1940 the landlord agreed in writing to accept £1,250. Nothing was given in return, and no end date was set.
In 1945, with the flats full again, the landlord sought the full rent. In 1946, Mr. Justice Denning held that full rent was due from mid-1945. He added that the landlord could not have claimed the full rent for the war years: “I am satisfied that a promise such as that to which I have referred is binding.”
On 14 June 2017, a fire in Grenfell Tower, a block of flats in West London, killed 72 people. The public inquiry published its final report on 4 September 2024. The inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, found that “the simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable.”
The report set out how a chain of failures across government and the private sector made the tower a death trap. It found fault with government, industry, cladding suppliers, the local council, the tenant management organization and the fire brigade. News reports summarized its findings as “decades of failure.”
Article 2406 of Mexico’s Federal Civil Code says that a lease must be in writing. If it is not, the fault is attributed to the landlord. In INEGI’s National Housing Survey of 2020, 16.4 percent of inhabited private homes were rented. Of these, 54.0 percent had a current rental contract.
INEGI’s report does not say how the others were agreed.
Under Article 2320 of Mexico’s Federal Civil Code, a property appraised at more than 365 times the daily minimum wage must be sold by escritura pública, a public deed. A private sale still binds the buyer and the seller. As the legal publication IDC Online explained in 2021, it has no effect against third parties. If the same property is sold twice, the sale registered first prevails.
In August 2026, Expansión reported that 294,660 homes in Mexico City, 16.5 percent of the total, have no escrituras, the public deeds that prove ownership. The figures come from the national household income and expenditure survey of 2024, as cited by the federal ministry of urban development, SEDATU.
In April 2026, Infobae warned against “escrituras de palabra” (deeds by word). It wrote that many people wrongly believe that a simple private contract of sale is enough to prove ownership. The safe route, it explained, is a public deed before a notary, entered in the public property register.
In October 2025, INSUS, the federal institute for land regularization, reported “alrededor de 24 millones de edificaciones potencialmente irregulares” (around 24 million potentially irregular buildings) in Mexico. According to Vanguardia, 93.5 percent came from sales without regularization and 6.5 percent from land invasions.
The institute added that “solo el 63 por ciento de ellas son aptas para regularización” (only 63 percent of them are suitable for regularization).
In 2024, a study by the Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter in Mexico looked at how Mexican families build their homes. According to El Imparcial, 42.9 percent of those planning to build trust a bricklayer most with the work, or consult one. 38.1 percent prefer an architect or an engineer.
The same study found that “el 78.7% de los albañiles consiguen empleo a través de recomendaciones de personas para quienes han trabajado anteriormente” (78.7 percent of bricklayers find work through recommendations from people they have worked for before).