Date: September 3, 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 12pm-1pm
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Foluke Adebisi (Professor of Law, University of Bristol Law School)
Race, colonialism and empire are central to understanding the history, nature and contemporary operation of legal knowledge. Drawing on examples that explore global inequality, structural racism, climate crisis, overexploitation and legal education, this paper examines how Euro-modern legal knowledge’s presumptions of objectivity, neutrality and universality hide the ways it remains deeply entangled with historical and contemporary relations of power. The paper critiques in particular the ways in which legal education obscures these entanglements, separating law from the social realities it helps to produce and sustain. Relying on a range of intellectual traditions, the paper explores how legal curricula can reproduce narrow understandings of knowledge, legitimacy and justice. It argues that initiatives centred solely on diversity or representation are insufficient if they leave intact the structures and assumptions through which legal knowledge is organised. Instead, legal education must confront the relationships between law, power, inequality and possibility. Despite the seeming intractability of the foregoing, the paper is also animated by hope and the idea that the law school remains a site of radical pedagogical possibility, where students and educators can challenge inherited assumptions, develop new ways of knowing and imagine more just futures. Ultimately, it calls for forms of legal education capable not only of analysing an unequal world, but of helping to create the conditions for another world to emerge.
Foluke Ifejola Adebisi is a Professor at the Law School, University of Bristol. Her scholarly work is concerned with what happens at the intersection of legal education, law, society, and a history of changing ideas of what it means to be human. Thus, her current scholarship focuses mainly on the relationship between theories of decolonisation and how they do and can interact with legal knowledge. She has written widely in this area. For example, she edited a special issue for the Law Teacher journal on decolonisation in 2019. She found and runs Forever Africa Conference and Events (FACE), a Pan-African interdisciplinary conference. She blogs about her scholarship and pedagogy on her website ‘Foluke’s African Skies’ at https://FolukeAfrica.com. In 2024, she was one of 5 finalists for Oxford University Press’ Law Teacher of the Year Award. Her monograph “Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility” was published by Bristol University Press in March 2023 and won the Society of Legal Scholars’ Margaret Brazier book prize for Outstanding Mid-Career scholarship in 2024.
Chair: Valeria Vázquez Guevara, Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=108772.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.