Epistemic Injustice and the Rule of Law: Stories from the Periphery

The law closely associates itself with justice and an open process that in theory gives equal epistemic opportunity to all. Nevertheless, as a growing literature has shown, legal systems also routinely produce epistemically unjust outcomes. This presentation uses a range of case studies from colonial and quasi-colonial contexts, and other situations on the periphery to offer an explanation of why legal systems can become epistemically unjust, and provide a preliminary outline of what might need to change about law if we are to solve this problem.

This presentation draws on a recently published paper on epistemic injustice.  Although the paper does not deal with colonial law, the ideas in it arose in the context of a project on private law and colonialism.  The presentation discusses that context, and argues that epistemic injustice arises from the law’s commitment to protecting its own inner normativity. This commitment leads it to treat perspectives and experiences that contradict the assumptions on which its normativity is based as 'epistemic dirt', ideas which are out of place in the law’s ordered world and which must be rejected to preserve that order. This problem emerges from fundamental aspects of the legal system, and addressing it will therefore require us to begin by reconceptualising the idea of the rule of law and recognising that it must also embed a commitment to giving legal subjects equal epistemic dimension.