Law: the state of play in a field of promise and disappointment

As Yanagihara and Foucault note, law is a powerful and sometimes discomfiting feature of planetary life. These characteristics, especially law’s globalising display of power, can be related to the pervasive effect of the colonial project and its exports around the world. One of the oft-cited benefits of colonialism, is the dubious gift to the colonised world of the ‘rule of law’. With this ‘Law’ comes the ‘Law School’ as an intellectual vanguard. Scattered across the world, these schools are often centres for incubation of new legal minds, but also crucibles of research, revolving around new strands of legal knowledge and thought. This introduction places law schools in a global context, reflecting on the current state of the law school in the UK. This includes a picture of the diversity (a word with fungible and varied meanings) within law schools in the UK, as well as the experiences of marginalised students and staff.

Across my time learning, practising, researching, and teaching law, I have witnessed and experienced the disorientation that comes with the field – punctured illusions and dashed expectations. Our students often arrive at university, full of ideas of what the world is, and the great things they would like to do within it … and yet the teaching of law can sometimes crush their spirits. We claim to teach them about the world, but sometimes we have no idea of what their world is. For some, their reality says: ‘[l]aw is not fair, it does not treat people equally, and its violence is lethal and routine’ (Akbar 2015: 355). Without acknowledging the truth of these experiences, the knowledge we transmit about the world proceeds from within the limited and a selective perspective of a discipline implicated in producing unequal social realities.