The Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria congratulates Dr Joel Modiri, a lecturer in the Department of Jurisprudence, on winning the JUTA prize for the best legal education paper at the Society of Law Teachers of Southern Africa Conference held during mid July 2018 in Cape Town.  The paper Dr Joel Modiri presented works at the intersection of a sociology of legal knowledge and Black radical political thought and critical race theory. 

Dr Modiri explains that 'The paper aimed to offer a general theoretical consideration of transforming legal education and legal scholarship through deploying the social reality of race (and by extension, class and gender) and South Africa’s history of colonial conquest as central categories of analysis.  However, my research found that the current demographic make-up of the legal academy, in particular the underrepresentation of black voices, does not enable openness to alternative non-Eurocentric traditions of legal and political analysis. In other words, the demographic narrowness of the legal academy also produces a conceptual narrowness in how law is theorised, taught and practiced.

Drawing on his work on Black Consciousness in the post-1994 context, he suggested taking African and African diasporic intellectual traditions as a starting point and developed new themes (such as liberation, epistemology, the psycho-social, historiography) to be explored in legal theory drawing on the Azanian/Africanist political tradition, principally represented by Anton Lembede, Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko. 

According to Dr Modiri, '[T]his is not an exhaustive project – the aim is not to replace or supplant existing theories but to critically interrogate the manner in which legal knowledge is enacted and reproduced in South Africa. The research is ongoing and aims to contribute to discourse and debate on curriculum transformation in legal studies as well as decolonisation of knowledge more broadly.  It also builds on my previous research on constructing a critical legal pedagogy that places history, power, justice, critical thinking and social context at the heart of legal education. The main concern of my research is to develop an approach to jurisprudence that takes seriously the gap, or tension, between the constitutional promise of equality, freedom and non-racialism and the ongoing reality of racial oppression, inequality and social conflict.

This research is central to Joel's teaching as well and he believes students are responding positively to these new approaches in legal scholarship. From 2016 to present, based on students' votes, he has been the recipient of the annual Lecturer of the Year Award. Dr Modiri says that 'This JUTA prize for best presentation on legal education from the Society of Law Teachers of Southern Africa is a rewarding affirmation that research being conducted in the Faculty of Law and the UP Department of Jurisprudence in particular is making a significant impact in the law teachers community in Southern Africa.'

Dr Modiri will be presenting aspects of this research during November 2018 at Columbia University, New York at the Institute for Research in African American Studies and again in February 2019 at UCLA Law School.