LL4EA Half Unit
Race, Class, and Law
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Dr Roxana Willis
Availability
This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time), MSc in Law and Finance and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process.
How to apply: Priority will be given initially to LLM, MSc Regulation and MSc Law and Finance students on a first-come-first-served allocation.
Spaces permitting, requests from all other students will be processed on the same first-come-first-served allocation from 10am on Thursday 2 October 2025
By submitting an application, students are confirming that they meet any pre-requisites specified. Providing an additional written statement will not aid a student's chances of being accepted onto a course, and statements are not read.
Deadline for application: Not applicable
For queries contact: Law.llm@lse.ac.uk
This course has a limited number of places and we cannot guarantee all students will get a place.
Course content
Have you ever wondered why we study law in the way we do? Have you ever questioned why the ‘logic’ of the law operates as it does? Have you noticed that certain issues, ideas, or voices are absent? And have you ever dreamt of using your legal education to effect change? In Race, Class, and Law we develop our critical, reflective, collaborative, and creative capacities to interrogate what the law does and to re-imagine what it can or should do. Borrowing from Andre Lorde’s influential metaphor, rather than attempting to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house – rather than trying to change the law by staying within the bounds of the procedures we’ve inherited – in Race, Class, and Law, we traverse a range of disciplines in search of new tools and ways to use them. Taking the English legal system as its point of departure, the course centres several inquiries: an examination of the legal system as experienced ‘from below’, a historical understanding on the making and workings of ‘modern law’, and a critical analysis of law beyond the confines of the nation state. By the end of the course, you will have acquired a fresh perspective on the law as seen from a diversity of perspectives, developed new skills to critique current laws, and engaged in innovative thinking about the future of law and potential for change.
The course is delivered through ten interactive weekly seminars. The first part of the course involves expanding our critical toolkit by re-examining foundational concepts that underpin the law, such as ‘neutrality’, ‘objectivity’, and ‘rationality’, allowing for creativity and feeling to inform our work. During our search for alternative ways to study law, we critically engage with decolonial debates, exploring how these ideas apply to law and reflecting on whether they should. Relatedly, we delve into abolitionist debates and the potential for transformative justice to improve law and society. Substantive topics include revisiting the ‘reasonable man’ in law and assessing the significance of gender, class, and race in his formation. We also explore the impact of trans-Atlantic slavery on the creation of the modern law and how its afterlives persist. Over the remaining weeks, we use our newly acquired tools in overlapping fields of law, such as crime and criminal justice, welfare and housing, labour law and immigration, conflict and violence, and climate justice and the Anthropocene. Instead of accepting the law is as it is, in Race, Class, and Law you are invited to evoke your radical imagination and envision how the law could be transformed in ways still to be discovered.
Teaching
20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.
Formative assessment
Students answer and submit a mock exam question (maximum 2,000 words).
Indicative reading
• Bhambra, G. (2007). Rethinking modernity: Postcolonialism and the sociological imagination. Berlin: Springer.
• Adébísí, Folúkẹ́ (2023) Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility, Bristol University Press
• Harrison, F. V. (Ed.). (2010). Decolonizing Anthropology – Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation (Third ed.). Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
• Táíwò, O. (2022). Against decolonisation: Taking African agency seriously. Hurst Publishers.
• Bhattacharyya, G., Elliott-Cooper, A., Balani, S., Nişancıoğlu, K., Koram, K., Gebrial, D., El-Enany, N. and de Noronha, L. (2021). Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State. London: Pluto Press.
• Elliot-Cooper, A. (2021) Black resistance to British Policing. Manchester University Press
• El-Enany, N. (2020) (B)ordering Britain: Race, law and empire. Manchester University Press
• Gopal, P. (2019) Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British dissent. Verso.
• Bradley and De Noronha (2022) Against borders: The case for abolition. Verso.
• Day, A.S. and McBean, S.O. (2022) Abolition Revolution. Pluto Press.
• Soulimani, A., England, G., and Hedidar W., (2021), ‘The (LSE) Decoloniality Reading Circle: A Manifesto in 14 Suggestions’. The Metric. Available at: https://themetric.org/articles/the-lse-decoloniality-reading-circle-a-manifesto-in-14-suggestions-2
• The (LSE) Decoloniality Reading Circle: A Suggested Reading List: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uvoPddD3eFYySOu_GkyTqj1z5iPvvJAr/view
Assessment
Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period
Key facts
Department: LSE Law School
Course Study Period: Winter Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 7
CEFR Level: Null
Total students 2024/25: 16
Average class size 2024/25: 16
Controlled access 2024/25: NoCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.
For this course, please see the following link/s:
LL4EA Race, Class, and Law Course Guide Video https://youtu.be/j3ekClEDhSs
Personal development skills
- Leadership
- Self-management
- Team working
- Problem solving
- Communication
- Specialist skills