Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of resistance in the law school.

Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure?and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores the resistance to that structure, including: different ways in which law?s pedagogic structures might be incomplete, or are being fought against; the use of less conventional elements of cultural discourse to resist the abstraction of the lawyer in students? subject formation; the centralisation of queer and feminist discourses to disrupt the hierarchies of the legal curriculum; the use of digital technologies; the place of embodiment in legal education settings; and the impacts of posthuman knowledges and contexts on legal learning.

Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars and emerging researchers, this book constitutes an indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

"Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education is an excellently generative text that will encourage law teachers to consider what it means to resist in the classroom, in the wider legal academy and beyond. The edited collection will inspire reflections on the extent to which legal educators are already resisting and to think on what additional ways of describing resistance are helpful in how it is achieved in legal education, such as refusals, subversions or even overhauls. This volume and its counterpart, Biopolitics and Structure in Legal Education, tessellate beautifully and underline that in order to resist an aspect of legal education, one must be deeply cognisant of its structures. Finally, both texts are an exemplary demonstration of writing about the theory and philosophy of legal education." Aysha Mazhar, Keele School of Law, UK, The Law Teacher 2024