Decolonisation and the Law School

Dreaming Beyond Aesthetic Changes to the Curriculum

Foluke I Adebisi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781040042762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal Education
• Index: Law

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Decolonisation and the law school: presences, absences, silences… and hope
• 1 Trust, courage and silence: carving out decolonial spaces in higher education through student–staff partnerships
• 2 “Law”, “order”, “justice”, “crime”: disrupting key concepts in criminology through the study of colonial history
• 3 Creating the law school as a meeting place for epistemologies: decolonising the teaching of jurisprudence and human rights
• 4 Researching colonialism and colonial legacies from a legal perspective
• 5 “Why is it my problem if they don’t take part?” The (non)role of white academics in decolonising the law school
• 6 Decolonising the master’s house: how Black Feminist epistemologies can be and are used in decolonial strategy
• 7 The ignored heritage of Western law: the historical and contemporary role of Islamic law in shaping law schools
• Index