As recent scholarship on legal pedagogy has demonstrated, the academy including law schools were a critical part of the colonial enterprise. This included, amongst other things, training colonial lawyers and devaluing and negating indigenous and customary legal systems whilst promoting and valorising Euro-centric laws as being the only authoritative ones. These colonial legacies continue to impact the ways in which we understand, teach and study law to this day.
In this context, it is imperative that legal scholars, researchers and teachers commit fully to adopting a decolonial and anti-racist approach to legal pedagogy. This requires having ‘difficult conversations about the ways in which history has influenced what the law is, what law is taught, how and who the law works and does not work for(Adebisi, 2023).’ Crucially, it necessitates a re-examination of the ways that we teach substantive areas of law and specifically, the foundational subjects of public law, criminal law, property law (land and equity and trusts) and obligations (contract and tort).
This one-day hybrid conference, funded by the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS), and organised by Dr Renginee G. Pillay (University of Greenwich), Dr Suhraiya Jivraj (University of Kent), Professor Foluke Adebisi (University of Bristol) and Dr Ntina Tzouvala (Australian National University) is to build on the recent work on decolonising and anti-racist approaches to legal pedagogy. In this context, we hope to bring together emerging and established legal scholars, researchers and teachers to share good practice and case studies of decolonial and antiracist approaches, especially (but not limited to) the core curriculum within law degrees.
As such, we invite abstracts in this area from scholars of all genders and career stages. Delegates will be able to present their papers in-person or online.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to [email protected] by 30 September 2023. Submissions should be accompanied by a 100-word bio summarising their current and previous academic and professional history and contact information. Successful participants will be notified by 9 October 2023.
The conference is FREE to attend. However, please note that we have limited spaces and cannot reimburse travel apart from a small number of travel bursaries for UK-based PhD students to attend. Please get in touch if this is relevant to you.
