law

Towards a Cultural Approach to Dangerousness in Criminal Justice

Alcatraz prison cells

What place does the concept of dangerousness occupy in criminal justice and criminalisation? Instead of seeing dangerousness as a characteristic of serious and persistent criminals, we should investigate its pervasive role in criminal justice, question its socio-affective allure, and unpick the problematic but intimate relation between criminal justice, structural inequalities, and oppression.

Read More

Is There an African Path to Disability Justice?

Dr Oche Onazi

ISRF EARLY CAREER FELLOW 2014-15

African legal theory, or legal philosophy, is defined as an enquiry into the ways in which law, legal concepts and institutions mirror the most salient and attractive communitarian values in sub-Saharan Africa. This project aims to show the role that can be played by African legal theory in forging and grounding a new response to exclusions suffered by people with disability in Africa as a matter of justice. 

Read More

The Law of Disorder

Dr Illan rua Wall

ISRF EARLY CAREER FELLOW 2016-17

This project will pioneer the new field of the law of disorder. Legal concepts are usually framed as being a part of the everyday social order. However, in moments of disorder we find the legal system stripped of its conventional architecture: the monopoly of the use of force, the control of territory and populations, the authority of the legislature, the constitutional unity of the people, or law’s claim to neutral universal protection. In moments of disorder, law as an institution and a basis of the social order is questioned. The problem with extant ideas of the law of disorder is that they start from law’s ‘normalcy’. The ‘Law of Disorder’ reverses the priority wherein law is the horizon of meaning for understanding disorder. Instead it places the emphasis on thinking from within the ‘disordered’ event, attempting to see beyond the conventional legal understanding of constitutional ‘origins’, criminal prosecution and balancing of rights.

Read More