Post-Conflict Legal Education

Abstract

This article contributes to the field of transitional justice by considering the neglected topic of legal education. It begins by cataloguing the material, human and programmatic ways in which war impacts on legal education. Materially, educational infrastructure may have been destroyed or appropriated, and in human costs, there will have been losses of staff and students, as well as the existence of trauma. Programmatically, war may have dislocated or replaced the substance of what law can be taught - there is often a disruptive `catch up` period until the legal regime and legal education accord with power shifts. Second, this article analyses the role of the international community in assisting post-conflict law schools. Despite problems of coordination, where the international community does work with law schools, the impact of legal education on post-war reconstruction can be appreciable. Finally, the article turns to the impact of legal education on post-war reconciliation. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the Balkans and South Caucasus, it argues that legal education has in many cases done little to promote reconciliation or even peaceful coexistence. The narratives of law teachers are often ethnically or politically chauvinist and incompatible with reconciliation efforts. After war, further attention must be paid to both substantive law taught and the specificities of conflict for this pattern to be altered.