Critical Pedagogies
Session #2: Friday, 9 January, 15.45 – 17.30 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Jennifer Beard and Sundhya Pahuja, University of Melbourne (jlbeard@unimelb.edu.au/s.pahuja@unimelb.edu.au)
Chair/discussant: Kamala Sankaran, Law Faculty, University of Delhi (kamala.sankaran@gmail.com)
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
- Jennifer Beard and Sundhya Pahuja, Constituting the Global Legal Subject
- Jason Keith Fernandes, Requiem for a Dream: The National Law School and the interpellation of the national subject
- Sandipto Dasgupta, The Student before the Law: An examination of student politics in national law school and the language of legal activism
- Ponni Arasu, The new law schools: boon or bane
Constituting the Global Legal Subject
Jennifer Beard and Sundhya Pahuja, University of Melbourne (jlbeard@unimelb.edu.au/s.pahuja@unimelb.edu.au)
This paper wishes to respond to the methodological provocation in the call, which asks what the tradition of the distinctive European post-Enlightenment critical legal studies may offer to fellowships of juristic learning. It will do so, not in the context of any one of the particular substantive streams listed, but by reflecting on a particular pedagogical experiment in the light of the LASS constitution. Our experiment was a 10 week course on ‘globalisation and the law’. Students from four countries were each assigned to two characters, and asked to perform those characters’ respective parts in two successive role play exercises. Each role-play centred on, and attempted to recreate, an apparent phenomenon of globalisation. One dealt with migrant workers, the other with foreign investment. After each role-play, students collaboratively theorised the exercise in live chat sessions mediated by us, the lecturers. The course was conducted entirely online, thus locating the students’ interactive presence in a classroom that itself seemed homologous with law’s universal claims. Physically, the students were located across, but not necessarily connected by citizenship, to four countries (China, Australia, U.S. and Canada). Otherwise, the students were either separated or connected not only by disciplines such as law, economics, anthropology, sustainability, commerce, public health or governance but also by their cultural experiences and language. Bodies and borders, therefore, were a complicated reality in this experiment; as well as two of the key themes of the role play exercises themselves. The point of our paper is critically to examine the utility of the course not only from the perspective of critical pedagogy but also in terms of addressing some of the reflexive aims of LASS. We are mostly interested in exploring the ways in which the internet role-play exercises enabled students to reflect critically on their own subjectivity and invited them to give an account of themselves as subjects dealing with law, advocating for and against law’s nature and effects and considering how they themselves are conduits of law and globalisation. Thus the subject (in all senses) provides both a thick, or rich site of ‘globalisation’ and a thick site of ‘law’ and legality.
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Requiem for a Dream: The National Law School and the interpellation of the national subject
Jason Keith Fernandes, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore (Doctoral Candidate) (jason.k.fernandes@gmail.com)
The National Law School of India represents perhaps the single most important contemporary reform in Indian legal education. Having being established in 1987, it is now a model that is being furiously copied across the country, and acclaimed by all for setting new standards in legal education in the country. Into this largely celebratory discourse of the institution, this paper will perhaps strike a discordant note as it seeks to read the architecture of built form and relationships within the institution to examine the kind of subject that is interpellated through the operations of the National Law School. Operating as the premier legal institution of the country, supplying fresh talent to the many theatres of the law, the legal condition within the National Law School is signal. By virtue of being regarded the premier law school in the country it marks the manner in which law is conceived within the legal field of the Indian nation-state and the manner it will be perpetuated by the elite corps who graduate out of this elite institution. The paper will comprise of three sections. In the first examining the circumstances of its birth, I argue that the National Law School is part of a project that sought to reinsert the appropriate national subject at the heart of the Indian nation-state. Destabilised from the central position it occupied at the birth of the independent nation state, the National Law School was a particularly effective method to rearticulate the aims of the nationalist class and co-opt the new middle and dominant classes into the nationalist project. If the aim of the National Law School was to interpellate the new national subject, then the second section of the essay documents some of the disciplinary practices through which this was and continues to be done within the Law school. To meet this end, I look at the architecture of built form and relationships within the law school. My argument is that the use of space in the National Law School campus and the culture of inhabitation around it produce a certain subject. This subject, I argue is one, better suited to Chatterjee’s political society, than the civil society they were to be groomed for. Given that the custodian and reproducer of the legal field produced by the National Law School is one with little appreciation for the workings of a civil society, what are the implications that this holds for understanding law in India? This would be the third aspect focused on in this paper.
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The Student before the Law: An examination of student politics in national law school and the language of legal activism
Sandipto Dasgupta, Graduate Student, Department of Political Science, Columbia University (sd2347@columbia.edu)
The paper tries to understand the relationship of law and politics in present day India by looking at what it meant to “be political” amongst the students of National Law School of India, from where I graduated. Law is taught in law school as a version of Hartian set of rules, devoid of most of its normative and all of its political contexts. What is imparted to and demanded of the students is a particular (and I will argue, ideological) skill set – how to think like a lawyer. This is done not just through institutional processes like the classroom, exams, and moot court competitions (each playing a specific role), but through creating a discursive process by which to make sense of the world. This discourse can be called ideological precisely because of its vigorous self-disavowal of ideology. The interesting aspect is how the students who consider themselves to be “acting politically” frame their dissent. I would argue that even when they are self-consciously standing up against the power, they articulate it within the discourse formulated by power. Even when speaking up against the law school, they use the language of the law (school). There are two crucial aspects of that language which has to be understood in depth. One is the displacement of passion by reason and/or interest. The second is the hegemony of the idea of liberal individualism. These tropes are prevalent in student politics within law schools (as I would try to show through the examples of protests against overt institutional interference in the “private lives” of the students, curfew times, disciplinary actions etc) and then are carried over to involvements of law school students with political and social causes outside the law school (e.g., activist lawyering) during or after their stay there. What I aim to show through an examination of the politics in law school is how dissent, as well as politics itself, gets legalized— not in the sense that it becomes permissible by law, but that it expresses itself primarily through the language of legality . The first move of the “activists” then becomes to posit the political subject, or the political issue, as a legal subject or a legal issue, so that the demands can be expressed in a rational-legal framework (an example to be discussed is that of the student board, where the students post freely their opinions about the law school, called the 19(1)(a), thereby claiming legitimacy of their right to speak freely, and politically, wholly on the basis of a constitutionally mandated right). One could argue that in this framework, the idea of political life or civil life is unthinkable (i.e., cannot be grasped), unless it is inescapably linked to law. Inherent in this is the obvious (though necessary) criticism of the liberal ideology, and how the law school sows the seeds for that ideology. However, I would like to make another, perhaps more fundamental point, about how this discourse leaves its participants incapable of making sense of a truly revolutionary moment, a moment of anomie that calls for a fundamental break of the order to found a new one. The need then, I would argue, is to find a new activism which is not just about a new law; which has available to it a language that is not wholly complicit with the language of western legal-rationalism.
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The new law schools: boon or bane
Ponni Arasu, ALF, Bangalore (mailponni@gmail.com)
This particular paper will look at the role of the new schools in espousing legal education that includes a social outlook. It will look at these law schools that began with an interdisciplinary method, to facilitate a more holistic understanding of the law and its role in society. The paper will be done through analysing the syllabi of these law schools, other official records that state the intention of this system, statements by staff members and administrative staff in this regard as well as opinions of students. It will try and trace the history of the at least two law schools (National Law School University of India, Bangalore and NALSAR, Hyderabad). The paper will see if there have been changes at three levels: the syllabi, teaching methods of both the law subjects, as well as the social science subjects and the atmosphere within the law schools which might contribute to the legal education that these institutions claimed to and intended to provide. The paper will look critically at the role of social sciences within this legal education and in what ways they have been taught and used to evolve critical perspectives. The paper will also include a question on how progressive legal education can be with regards to opinions on various social issues and in what ways can the boundaries of the profession and education for the same can be pushed and what the implications are of this act of challenging. It will be an analysis of legal education in these law schools with regard to its potential to give room for different kinds of lawyering and not one that is only statusquoist and one that believes and upholds that the law is after all, infallible and superior.
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