Your World of Legal Intelligence
 United Kingdom | +44 (0) 20 7284 8080

Remembering Peter Fitzpatrick

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 December 2020
Published date01 December 2020
DOI10.1177/0964663920957376
Subject MatterEditorial
SLS957376 765..766
Editorial
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(6) 765–766
Remembering
ª The Author(s) 2020
Peter Fitzpatrick
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0964663920957376
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
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 produc-
tion, 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 partic-
ular 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...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT