The transnationalization of legal education on the periphery: Continuities and changes in colonial logics for a “Globalizing” Africa

This chapter explores how colonial legal relations continued to shape legal education and institutions in Africa after independence. It outlines the nature of legal education within the context of postindependence policies that span from the periods of optimism to the radical degeneration in the higher education sector until the mid-1990s. It also highlights how Africa lags at the bottom of certain higher education globalization indicators, possessing extreme degrees of internationalization through the mobility of its students or dependence on foreign funding and epistemic resources. The chapter argues that the idea of Africa provides a critical lens in rethinking the role of legal education in the twenty-first century in a context of widening material and epistemic inequality. It considers the role of international donors with their renewed support for higher education from the 1990s.