Events
CCTL Comparative Public Law Research Forum Seminar - 'Inventing Necessity: Law and Revolution in Postcolonial Africa' by Dr. Coel Kirkby (Online)
31 May 2024
12:00noon – 1:00pm (HKT)
Online (Zoom)
Coel Kirkby is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney Law School and the Director of the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence. He was elected the Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge for 2017-8. Before that Coel was a McKenzie Fellow at Melbourne Law School, an Endeavour Fellow at UNSW and a researcher at the Dullah Omar Institute. He has also worked on contemporary constitutional reform projects from Fiji and Tuvalu to Victoria and South Africa.
In the late 1960s, judges in newly independent African states faced the hardest of hard cases: whether to recognize the legitimacy of new legal orders established violent military or white supremist coups. These judicial decisions, as Claire Palley noted, were ‘manna for jurisprudes.’ The cases fed arguments in dozens of law journal articles across the Commonwealth, including new volumes published by African universities in Accra, Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Lagos and Nairobi. I will read these transnational legal arguments on law and revolution within contemporary discourses of Cold War liberalism (and its rivals). Academic interest in the doctrine of necessity was never merely intellectual. At stake—at least for some intervenors—was the future of liberal legal orders in the form of independent African states disciplined by Westminster-model constitutions characterized by representative democracy and limited government. The threat to this order came from revolutionary governments that aimed to overthrow this ideal of formal equality (both internationally and domestically) in pursuit of African socialism or white domination. ‘Should courts enforce the dictates of […] Fascist or Communist revolutionaries or terrorists,’ worried Palley, ‘if any of these groups seize power?’ The answers to these questions relied on competing representations of the nature of law, which imagined different models of the modern state and its possible futures.
Language: English
