The Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria is proud to announce that one of its staff members has, at the age of 26, qualified as a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) on Thursday, 15 February 2018.  Dr Joel Modiri's thesis, titled “The Jurisprudence of Steve Biko: A Study in Race, Law and Power in the Afterlife of Colonial-apartheid” addresses the relationship between law, race and power in post-1994 South Africa.

The overall aim of Modiri’s project was to locate Steve Biko’s critical social theory of race within the liberatory narrative of the Africanist political tradition and to do so with law, jurisprudence and legal theory as the central concern or “disciplinary location”. Working at the intersection of Black Consciousness and critical race theory, his project seeks to challenge the dominant historical, political and intellectual assumptions that make up the idea of “post-apartheid South Africa”. 

In the thesis, Modiri develops an indigenous South African critical race theory with reference to the writings of Steve Biko. In particular the thesis posits a co-thinking of critical race theory and Black Consciousness to develop a theoretical intervention into the fundamental contradiction of post-1994 South African society, namely the continuation, persistence and escalation of racial inequalities and hierarchies produced through over 360 years of white colonial domination in a putatively new constitutional order that espouses non-racial and egalitarian ideals. Modiri argues that Biko’s political and intellectual project (encapsulated in the philopraxis of Black Consciousness) offers an alternative way of framing, understanding and responding to debates around history, memory, race and racism, power, equality, justice, and freedom.  In this regard, he argues that it can also be read as an anti-racist critique of law within the framework of an expanded understanding of jurisprudence.

Joel is a lecturer in the Department of Jurisprudence and his doctorate degree was supervised by Professor Karin van Marle in the same department.  He completed his LLB degree (cum laude) in 2013 at the University of Pretoria, whereafter he pursued a Master's degree and converted to a Doctorate degree in 2015.