Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Setting the Scene of the Law School and the Discipline
- 1 Theories of Decolonisation; or, to Break All the Tables and Create the World Necessary for Us All to Survive
- 2 What Have You Done, Where Have You Been, Euro-Modern Legal Academe? Uncovering the Bones of Law’s Colonial Ontology
- 3 Defining the Law’s Subject I: (Un)Making the Wretched of the Earth
- 4 Defining the Law’s Subject II: Law and Creating the Sacrifice Zones of Colonialism
- 5 Defining the Law’s Subject III: Law, Time, and Colonialism’s Slow Violence
- 6 The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time
- Conclusion: Another University Is Necessary to Take Us towards Pluriversal Worlds
- References
- Cases Cited
- Index
2 - What Have You Done, Where Have You Been, Euro-Modern Legal Academe? Uncovering the Bones of Law’s Colonial Ontology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Setting the Scene of the Law School and the Discipline
- 1 Theories of Decolonisation; or, to Break All the Tables and Create the World Necessary for Us All to Survive
- 2 What Have You Done, Where Have You Been, Euro-Modern Legal Academe? Uncovering the Bones of Law’s Colonial Ontology
- 3 Defining the Law’s Subject I: (Un)Making the Wretched of the Earth
- 4 Defining the Law’s Subject II: Law and Creating the Sacrifice Zones of Colonialism
- 5 Defining the Law’s Subject III: Law, Time, and Colonialism’s Slow Violence
- 6 The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time
- Conclusion: Another University Is Necessary to Take Us towards Pluriversal Worlds
- References
- Cases Cited
- Index
Summary
In order to know what it [law] is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. … The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds … with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1923: 1–2)The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation [and a world] arguing with its conscience. … What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love?
Barack Obama (2004: 437–8)Introduction
An appreciation of what the law is, what it has been and the possible directions it could take humanity, requires, as Holmes and Obama note, a deep excavation of its history and ontology. In other words, to understand how the conditions of life introduced and globalised by colonialism have become normalised and woven into the structures that reproduce the current world, it is important to understand the role of Euro-modern law in shaping global structures as well as human behaviour and standards. Without a detailed examination of this, decolonisation will fail to properly engage with the power and possibility produced by Euro-modern legal knowledge. In thinking through decolonisation and legal knowledge, Sara Ahmed’s writings on ‘use’ are very instructive here. She writes that ‘use’ can sometimes become a subversion of ‘function’. The way a thing is used can subvert or even obliterate its supposed function. ‘The more a path is used, the more a path is used’ (Ahmed 2019: 41). ‘Use’ is how the past lives on in the present. Use is how lawful becomes normal, becomes natural, becomes just the way things are. Therefore, this chapter examines the nature of Euro-modern law and how this nature enabled/enables legal knowledge’s (re)production and maintenance of colonial logics and praxes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Decolonisation and Legal KnowledgeReflections on Power and Possibility, pp. 38 - 64Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023