How do law schools teach the histories and legacies of race and empire? If they do at all? What pedagogical approaches are emerging to address colonialism, racialisation and global inequalities within legal education? Where are they emerging? What challenges and opportunities do educators encounter in undertaking this work? These questions sit at the heart of the launch event for the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network, a new collaborative initiative dedicated to fostering dialogue, innovation and community around the teaching of race and empire within legal education. Registration is free, and participation is available both in person and online. Register here: Launching the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network
The launch event will take place on 14 September 2026 at the University of Bristol, bringing together academics, researchers, practitioners and students from across disciplines and jurisdictions. It represents an important milestone in the development of a growing international conversation about how legal education can engage more meaningfully with the histories, structures and contemporary realities of empire, colonialism and racialisation.
Why a Network on Race, Empire and Legal Pedagogy?
As I have noted across this blog and in my work, colonialism, race and empire are central to understanding the history, nature, and contemporary operation of legal knowledge. They shape how we imagine the future of law and legal institutions … how we imagine and build a future that is not just survivable but flourishing. As legal educators, we cannot fully understand law without grappling with the imperial and colonial contexts in which much legal knowledge was produced and continues to circulate. Engaging with race and empire therefore requires more than adding new content to existing curricula. It requires us to reflect critically on how legal knowledge is constructed, whose voices are amplified, whose experiences are marginalised, and what assumptions underpin our approaches to teaching and learning. This demands that we do not conflate representation and liberation. Changing the players is not the same as changing the game. We are still playing a colonial game.
While a lot of traffic has happened in the name of diversity and decolonisation, the language of decolonisation has itself frequently been absorbed into institutional frameworks in ways that blunt its critical force. This is a trajectory that can be traced from diversity initiatives to decolonisation projects, through processes of institutional co-optation and abandonment. Furthermore, much of the rigorous work involved in embedding histories of race and empire in legal education often takes place in isolation, within individual institutions or national contexts.
In a period marked by multiple crises across higher education and society more broadly, the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network seeks to create a space where these conversations can be brought together. The network aims to strengthen connections between scholarship and teaching, facilitate the sharing of resources and experiences, and support the development of more critically engaged and inclusive approaches to legal education. A particular commitment of the network is to amplify perspectives from the Global South and non-Anglophone contexts, recognising that meaningful discussions about law, race and empire must extend beyond dominant Euro-American frameworks.
Why Should You Attend the Launch Event?
The launch has been designed as a hybrid half-day event, enabling participation from colleagues and students across the world. Participants will be invited not only to reflect on the current state of the field but also to contribute to conversations about its future directions.
The programme includes an exploration of what is currently being taught about race and empire within legal education, where this teaching is situated within law school curricula, how approaches differ across jurisdictions and where significant gaps remain. This discussion aims to provide an overview of the field while identifying opportunities for future development.
We will also focus on pedagogy itself. Contributors will be invited to reflect on traditional and non-traditional teaching methods, the relationship between research and teaching, institutional challenges and opportunities, and the role of student-led and precarious academic innovation in shaping the field.
This network relies firmly on collective participation; as such, the interactive aspects are dedicated to, among other things, imagining future directions together. Participants will discuss pedagogical innovations, support for Global South and precarious scholars, collaborative research opportunities, resource sharing, public engagement initiatives and forms of impact beyond the academy.
Building Community as Intellectual Practice
At its heart, the network is about community-building. The organisers view the creation of scholarly networks as an important intellectual and political practice in itself, one that can help sustain conversations that are often marginalised within mainstream legal education. The network seeks to foster relationships across institutions, disciplines and geographical locations while creating opportunities for collaboration and mutual support.
This emphasis on community reflects a broader recognition that questions of race, empire and colonialism are deeply intertwined with the histories, structures and futures of legal knowledge. The network therefore provides a space not only to critically analyse legal education as it currently exists, but also to imagine how it might be transformed.
The building of community also responds directly to the “colonial disconnect” as theorised by Jackson-Cole, Lechêne & Kula. According to them, through processes of alienation, separation, segregation, categorisation and dehumanisation, it is demonstrated how,
colonial disconnect is not a mere consequence of coloniality, but a necessary condition enabling it. One cannot dehumanise others without disconnecting from one’s humanity. One cannot exploit natural resources without disconnecting from nature. One cannot assume epistemic superiority without disconnecting from communal knowledges (2025: 4-5).
What Can You Do to Join the Conversation?
Whether you are already teaching and researching in this area, are beginning to incorporate questions of race and empire into your work, or are simply interested in the future of education, the launch event offers an opportunity to engage with a growing international community of scholars, educators and students. In due course after you register, we will send information on how to contribute to the mapping exercise.
The launch of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network marks the beginning of what we hope will become a sustained and generative space for dialogue, collaboration and innovation. At a time when legal education is vitally needed to respond to pressing questions of inequality, justice and historical responsibility, the need for such conversations has never been more urgent.
Here is a simple checklist of things that you can do to join in:
- Register for the event
- Share the event across all your networks: LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, X, or other professional platforms
- Invite specific people to the launch event
- Circulate announcements through relevant mailing lists.
- Subscribe to our network mailing list
- Mention membership of the network on institutional profiles.
A final word from bell hooks
We cannot address this crisis if progressive critical thinkers and social critics act as though teaching is not a subject worthy of our regard. The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy…. Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions… a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom. (hooks 1994:12)
Bibliography
Hooks, Bell. Teaching to transgress. Routledge, 1994.
Jackson-Cole, Dominik, Joris Lechêne, and Sidonia Lucia Kula. “Toward decoloniality of connectedness in higher education.” Studies in Higher Education (2025): 1-14.
