Dr Roxana Willis

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law and LLB in Laws. This course is not available as an outside option nor to General Course students.

Course summary

Students typically learn how to become lawyers by studying, analysing, and applying ‘the law’. This is principally because mainstream legal courses prioritise teaching these skills to law students. While this approach is indeed valuable, it tends to presume the idea of the law as a fixed and objective entity. In this course, we develop a decolonial approach to the study of law that challenges this central presumption: we explore what the law ‘is’ by looking, among other things, at how real people in real situations experience and act upon the legal system. Taking the English legal system as its point of departure, the course centres several inquiries: an examination of the legal system as experienced ‘from below’, a historical understanding on the making and workings of ‘modern law’, and a critical analysis of law beyond the confines of the nation state. By the end of the course, students will have acquired a fresh perspective on the law as seen from a diversity of perspectives, developed new skills to critique current laws, and engaged in innovative thinking about the future of law and potential for change.

Course Structure

There are ten substantive topics that will be covered by this course, taught through a combination of lectures and interactive seminars. The first week addresses the question ‘What is law?’ from the perspective of dominant legal theory as well as critical schools of thought, including feminist, Marxist, and socio-legal. The second week works towards a decolonial agenda for law, offering a genealogy of key decolonial thinkers and applying their thinking to the law. The third week turns to the historical making of modern law, with a focus on the legal subject and the criminalised ‘immoral other’. Over the remaining weeks, students then examine the legal subject as it occurs in overlapping legal fields, including property rights and land, labour law and immigration, welfare and housing, crime and criminal justice, climate justice and the Anthropocene, and indigenous justice movements. We conclude the course by reflecting on recent calls for abolition.

20 hours of seminars in the AT.

Participation in a co-organised class symposium where work-in-progress is presented (pre-recorded videos are permitted as a presentational form).

• Bhambra, G. (2007) Rethinking modernity: Postcolonialism and the sociological imagination. Berlin: Springer.
• Adébísí, F. (2023) Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge Reflections on Power and Possibility, Bristol University Press.
• Harrison, F. V. (Ed.) (2010) Decolonizing Anthropology - Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation (Third ed.). Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
• Bhattacharyya, G., Elliott-Cooper, A., Balani, S., Nisancioglu, K., Koram, K., Gebrial, D., El-Enany, N. and de Noronha, L. (2021).Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State. London: Pluto Press.
• Elliot-Cooper, A. (2021) Black resistance to British Policing, Manchester University Press.
• Gopal, P. (2019) Insurgent Empire: anticolonial Resistance and British dissent, Verso Books.
• Bradley and De Noronha (2022) Against borders: the case for abolition. Verso Books.
• Willis, R. (2023) A Precarious Life: Community and conflict in a deindustrialised town, OUP.
• Koch, I. (2018), Personalizing the state: An anthropology of law, politics, and welfare in austerity Britain, OUP.
• Klinkert, V. L. (2021). ‘Humbling anthropology: Ego reflexivus and White ignorance.’ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 11(1), 309-318.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.

Students will devise their own essay title, with support and feedback from the course convenor. Students will be expected to engage with readings across at least two weeks of the course and will be encouraged to research beyond the essential readings.