Reflections on legal education and radical intellectual equality

Abstract

In this article I reflect, against the background of the recent special issue of this journal titled: “Law as humanities discipline: Transformative potential and political limits”, on the notion of radical intellectual equality within the context of South African legal education and culture. I suggest that this notion, postulated by Jacques Rancière’s reflections on pedagogy, can foster notions of criticalness and critical thinking and provide new ways of thinking about legal education in an effort to disrupt and actively question the continuous legacy of legal formalism and scientism. A different way of staging legal education, along the lines of invention and thought from within universal teaching, might be able to reveal transformative and emancipatory possibilities. I call for a radical redistribution of South African approaches to legal education.