Abstract
The Social & Legal Studies editorial board joins with many others in mourning the recent loss of Professor Peter Fitzpatrick and in celebrating his highly productive life as a scholar, teacher, and mentor.
Peter was one of the small number of socio-legal scholars who established our journal almost three decades ago, and for many years he continued to shape it. Most especially, his influence can be seen in our journal’s commitment to anti-colonial approaches to the study of law. This is expressed in our aims and scope, and guides our work in publishing papers and in supporting initiatives that seek to challenge unequal knowledge production, such as the Global South Writing Workshops.
Peter had a long and distinguished career as a legal academic, teaching in North America, Papua New Guinea, and Belfast before finding a home first at Kent, briefly at Queen Mary University of London, and then ultimately at Birkbeck. He was part of a generation of scholars whose early career academic mobility led them to identify and challenge the parochialism of British legal education (Harrington and Manji, 2017). His work has been profoundly influential in the fields of legal philosophy, and law and social theory, and was at the forefront of anthropological and postcolonial approaches to the study of law at a time when these approaches were a major challenge to conventional approaches. In addition to making a significant contribution to other journals, in particular Law and Critique, Peter edited Pluto Press’s series in Law and Social Theory; and, with Maureen Cain, he established the Critical Legal Conference, which for generations of students was a formative influence. He was, as Alan Norrie notes, a ‘tirelessly innovative scholar, unafraid to take risks in a notoriously conservative milieu’ (Norrie, 2003: 105). Generations of his postgraduate research students have now moved onto independent academic (and other) careers all over the world, carrying his insights, his wisdom, and his spirit of intellectual engagement with them.
As a tribute to his work and to record our gratitude for Peter’s life and scholarship, we are today publishing in open access two special issues that showcase his contribution to the journal. The first issue, curated by us, presents some of Peter’s own work: a paper that appeared in the first volume of Social & Legal Studies, when he was a founding member of its new editorial board; a review essay on capital punishment; and a Debate and Dialogue, in which he engages with Alan Norrie and Peter Goodrich regarding his then recently published book, Modernism and the Grounds of Law. We have also included reviews of three of Peter’s better known books (including Grounds of Law) in the belief that those readers who have not yet read them are likely to be thereby persuaded to do so. Secondly, we are making freely available a special issue that Peter co-edited with Eve Darian Smith on a topic that was particularly close to his heart and which he championed both within Social & Legal Studies and more generally: Law and Postcolonialism. As we selected these critical interventions, we have reflected on how his scholarship on nationality and nationalism, empire and race, post and anti-colonialism, myth and modernity, are newly relevant today. We hope that scholar activists and students seeking to critique and challenge dominant accounts of history and empire will find much in Peter’s insights to guide and to inspire.
Peter’s influence on the journal extends well beyond these papers. Other authors have used Social & Legal Studies as a platform for engaging with his work. Many more will have had their ideas sharpened as a result of his incisive, constructive and generous reviews. And those of us who worked with Peter, either on the Social & Legal Studies board or elsewhere, likewise benefited from his intellectual curiosity, clear-sighted intelligence, constructive engagement, friendship, mentoring, support, and gentle good humour.
We will miss Peter deeply. But we look forward to seeing new generations of students and scholars discover his ideas for the first time and others revisit, reconsider and engage with them. We very much hope that some of those new entanglements will take place in the pages of this journal.
The Editorial Board of Social & Legal Studies