Our Head of School says:
There is no place else like the SOAS School of Law—here as an LLB, BA, LLM/MA, or PhD student you will find a singular environment in which to pursue an education in law, a singular collection of teachers and researchers, and, perhaps most importantly, a singular approach to and understanding of the field of law itself—one that is anchored in and focussed on the Global South, on post-colonial legal geographies, and on diversity and inequality.
For us, that means the whole world, not just the so-called Third World: the globalised economic order and the multipolar intersovereign order, necessarily, but beyond them the teeming hyperspace of normative orders, from constitutional to customary. Diversity is not a box we tick, it’s our core identity: we embrace it in our students, we embody it in our staff, we study it in our research, and we reflect it in our teaching.
As I write these words of welcome, much of the world is still engulfed by or transitioning through the pandemic. Nothing could be more emblematic of the SOAS School of Law than its analytic and critical engagement with the legal dimensions underlying both a viral pandemic with staggeringly disproportionate effects on BAME communities and the cumulative ravages of the virus of racialisation. Here you will find a collective of scholar-teachers who use law to investigate colonialism, capitalism and the human-caused transformation of nature, from microbes to ice-sheets. Come study at SOAS and we’ll explain how and why we think law has a lot to do with pandemics and race—and a great deal else that’s fundamental to our shared 21st century moment, from gender and sexuality to multinational corporations, from global value chains to conflicts and peace settlements. We’ll help you to become— or become better— lawyers, activists, researchers, or civil servants, but at the same time we promise you you’ll never look at law the same way.