Troubling Law’s Traditional Canon by Teaching Law and Race

In this chapter the authors provide an account of their experience and practice of designing and teaching an optional final-year LLB unit at the University of Bristol Law School called ‘Law and Race’. This unit involved a critical exploration of the ways in which law has impacted upon and caused racial disparities, and how these factors are continuously embedded and reproduced within the operation of law. It also aimed to create a space for students to have the conversations that they may have been unable to have so far in their law degrees. The chapter details the personal and professional impetus for and aims that guided the design of ‘Law and Race’, including the anticolonial and antiracist framework the unit design relies upon. It concludes that the inclusion of this unit, despite certain limitations, offers a compelling pedagogical advantage for students in its centring of antiracist and anticolonial perspectives and methods, and its conscious displacement of the ethos of the traditional law curriculum. Further, it argues that a unit like ‘Law and Race’ can provide those of us committed to thoroughgoing critical pedagogy with the tools and motivation to engage with decolonisation in the law curriculum more broadly.