1st Edition
Decolonisation and the Law School Dreaming Beyond Aesthetic Changes to the Curriculum
This book explores strategies, approaches, tools, challenges, and reflections that animate the conversation around decolonisation in UK law schools. It investigates how we can have, within the UK law school, difficult conversations about the ways in which history has influenced what the law is, how law is taught, what law is taught, who the law works for, and who the law does not work for.
The conversation about decolonisation of the university and curricula continues to raise questions for knowledge production and transmission in educational institutions. Decolonisation also raises questions about the impact of the preceding issues on people within and outside these educational institutions. The decolonisation debate is an opportunity for legal academics to reflect on the origins of their own individual academic practices in research as well as the content of their curriculum. This volume examines the preceding issues as they relate to academic practices and legal pedagogy in UK law schools. The authors examine how legal scholars can achieve aims of decolonisation within the practical aims of teaching of law, as well as the limitations and possible challenges of these endeavours.
This volume will be of interest to legal scholars, legal educators, law students as well as legal practitioners who are engaged in questions of how decolonisation relates to law – broadly understood. It was originally published as a special issue of The Law Teacher.
Introduction: Decolonisation and the law school: presences, absences, silences… and hope, Foluke I. Adebisi
1. Trust, courage and silence: carving out decolonial spaces in higher education through student–staff partnerships,
Ahmed Raza Memon and Suhraiya Jivraj
2. “Law”, “order”, “justice”, “crime”: disrupting key concepts in criminology through the study of colonial history
J.M. Moore
3. Creating the law school as a meeting place for epistemologies: decolonising the teaching of jurisprudence and human rights
Sophie Rigney
4. Researching colonialism and colonial legacies from a legal perspective
Nandini S. Boodia-Canoo
5. “Why is it my problem if they don’t take part?” The (non)role of white academics in decolonising the law school
Nick Cartwright and T.O. Cartwright
6. Decolonising the master’s house: how Black Feminist epistemologies can be and are used in decolonial strategy
Oluwaseun Matiluko
7. The ignored heritage of Western law: the historical and contemporary role of Islamic law in shaping law schools
Imranali Panjwani
Biography
Foluke I. Adebisi is Professor of law at the University of Bristol Law School. Her scholarship on decolonisation and legal pedagogy responds to the question of what it means to be human.
