On the Possibility of Justice: Disrupting the Coloniality of Law

Abstract

From industrial pig farming to the dredging of ocean floors for sand, our world sanctions the exploitation of nature for the endeavours of humans. To understand why this is, we must be more judicious – whose world sanctions this and for which human? The thesis investigates this through the discourse of ‘modernity/coloniality’. ‘Modernity’ refers to the hegemonic epistemic frame that unjustly holds a specific kind of world for a specific kind of human over and above other worlds and other humans (coloniality). In regard to legal studies, this begs the question: ‘To what extent do dominant ideas of justice and the systems of law they espouse necessarily uphold injustice?’ The thesis argues that dominant ideas of justice, referred to as rules-based justice, are insufficient to address the injustice of the coloniality of law. The thesis calls for the intervention of an alternative conception of justice it refers to as place-based justice.