Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
With the study of law’s relationship with racial justice in mind, this chapter draws on theories of antiracism and progressive lawyering to set out four principles for antiracist lawyering: reflection, creativity, collaboration, and accountability. It argues that lawyers who wish to promote racial justice should engage in reflection, should adopt creative approaches to lawyering, should collaborate, and should remain accountable to their clients.
This concluding chapter summarizes the analysis throughout the book, drawing on the case of Shamima Begum to highlight the limits of law in the struggle for racial justice. It also considers how law has been used to advance racial justice in former colonies of the British Empire. It considers the legal case for reparations for slavery, the use of law to secure compensation for victims of racial injustices in Kenya, and the use of law to challenge the death penalty in Barbados, a vestige of colonial rule.
The introduction draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the relationship between law and racial justice, highlighting how the law can be used to both help and hinder the struggle for racial justice. We might assume that the legal system will be allied to the idea of racial justice because it is said to be underpinned by the principles of neutrality and fairness, and there are various Acts of Parliament that appear to give effect to these principles such as the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. However, there are examples of law failing to advance racial justice and sometimes facilitating racial injustices. The Introduction sets out the central contention of this book: that there are historical, cultural, and systemic reasons for the limits of law.
This chapter sets out some definitional and conceptual issues. It defines the term racial justice and outlines six key concepts of Critical Race Theory that underpin the analysis in the rest of the book: structural racism, the social construction of race and racism, intersectionality, interest-convergence, lived theory, and the inherent limits of legal processes. It also outlines the problems with ubiquitous terms such as BAME, equality, diversity, and inclusion.
As the British Empire disintegrated in the aftermath of the world wars in the first half of the 1900s, immigration laws were developed which replicated the effect of colonial rule. These laws maintained the two-tiered legal system that had developed during colonial rule, ensuring that people racialized as something other than ‘White British’ were denied the full protection of the law. Yet at the same time, laws to promote good race relations were introduced, which appeared to make the legal system a tool for racial justice, rather than racial injustice. It is with this in mind that we can better understand racial injustices today, in education, criminal justice, employment, housing, and healthcare systems.
This chapter is concerned with the use of law to create and perpetuate racial injustices during the era of the British Empire. It explores the use of law to justify and facilitate imperialism and colonial rule and to legitimize slavery. It considers how law was used to impose social control over indigenous populations and the ways in which law created the phenomenon of structural racism. In effect, a two-tiered legal system was created: one for those classed as White British, and another more disadvantageous system for those classed as something other than White British.
Racial justice is never far from the headlines. The Windrush Scandal, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston and racism within the police have all recently captured the public’s attention and generated legal action. But, although the ideals of the legal system such as fairness and equality, seem allied to the struggle for racial justice, all too often campaigners have been let down by the system.
This book examines law’s troubled relationship with racial justice. It explains that law’s historical role in creating and perpetuating racial injustices continues to stifle its ability to advance the cause of racial justice today.
Both a lawyer’s guide to anti-racism and an anti-racist’s guide to legal action, it unites these perspectives to help both groups understand how to use the law to tackle racial injustices.
The legal system today appears to promote racial justice, through laws that prohibit racial discrimination and race hate crimes, for example. The law also requires public authorities to take proactive steps to advance racial equality and to foster good race relations. As this chapter illustrates, though, there are limits to the use of law. In education, criminal justice, employment, healthcare, and housing, legal authorities have been unable or unwilling to grapple with the six concepts of Critical Race Theory set out in Chapter 1: the problem of structural racism, the social construction of race and racism, intersectionality, interest-convergence, lived theory, and the limits of adversarial legal processes.
The Refugee Convention protects certain individuals and groups from ‘being persecuted’. No further direct definition is offered in the text of the Convention and the question of what might constitute ‘being persecuted’ has proven to be a challenging one to answer. The ambiguity can be regarded as constructive in nature: from the travaux preparatoires, we know that the drafters of the Refugee Convention had in mind that ‘being persecuted’ involved a high level of harm but they declined to lay down a more precise meaning. As an early scholar of refugee law, Grahl-Madsen, put it, ‘[i]t seems as if the drafters have wanted to introduce a flexible concept which might be applied to circumstances as they might arise; or, in other words, that they capitulated before the inventiveness of humanity to think up new ways of persecuting fellow men’. Goodwin-Gill makes the same point, saying ‘[t]here being no limits to the perverse side of human imagination, little purpose is served by attempting to list all known measures of persecution’. Enumeration of the various horrible acts that might amount to ‘being persecuted’ – or those slightly less horrible acts that might not – becomes self-evidently undesirable when seen in this light. A list may be simple and easily comprehended, but it is too rigid in that it fails to allow for context and is incapable of evolving over time. In 1979, the UNHCR Handbook stated that ‘[t]here is no universally accepted definition of “persecution”, and various attempts to formulate such a definition have met with little success’.
As well as being gained, refugee status can be lost, taken away or denied. Refugee status may be lost when it is no longer needed because the refugee can return home. In some situations, this may be voluntary on the part of the refugee but the Refugee Convention also provides for countries of asylum to terminate refugee status on certain grounds even if this is against the refugee’s wishes. The provisions in the Refugee Convention addressing loss of refugee status are often referred to as the cessation clauses and are found at Article 1C. Refugee status is also denied in some limited circumstances. Denial of refugee status is aimed at those who would normally be entitled to refugee status but who are considered either not to need it or not to deserve it. These provisions denying refugee status are often referred to as the exclusion clauses and are found at Articles 1D, 1E and 1F of the convention. Article 1D excludes Palestinian refugees on the basis that they are entitled to protection from a different United Nations agency. Article 1E was intended to apply to historic groups of ethnic Germans in post-war Europe but is framed more widely so as potentially to apply to those who have rights equivalent to the citizens of the country in which they reside. Article 1F excludes certain individuals on the grounds of moral opprobrium in order to protect the reputation and integrity of the Refugee Convention. Cessation of or exclusion from refugee status are conceptually distinct from formal retention of refugee status but loss of the benefits of refugee status, including protection from expulsion or refoulement.
