Events on Decolonial Comparative Law
The DeCoLa Programme organises a series of global workshops and occasional summer schools, all in the field of decolonial comparative law. Together with local partners who change every edition, researchers discuss decolonial legal theory, comparative Indigenous law, or research methodologies.
Video: Decolonial Comparative Law Summer School, 4-8 July 2023
Past events
Comparative Property Law - a workshop conference and a spring school in Brazil
4-9 November 2024 - Brasília/Bahia
Decolonial Comparative Law Summer School
4-8 July 2023, Hamburg, Germany
Decolonial comparative legal history: indigenous and Global South law prior to colonialism
Second Decolonial Comparative Law Workshop
9-10 September 2022, Oxford, United Kingdom

Held at Trinity College, University of Oxford, from 9 to 10 September 2022, this workshop dealt with decolonial comparative legal history, comparing indigenous law and pre-colonial law, both in settler-colonial regions of the Global North and in the area now often referred to as the Global South. The event was a follow-up to the first Decolonial Comparative Law Workshop, which took place in 2020 and focused on the general theme of decolonial comparative law.
The second Decolonial Comparative Law Workshop interwove several objectives: delinking from colonial notions of law; exploring decolonial (legal) historiography; comparing indigenous law in settler-colonized regions and pre-colonial law in colonized regions; offering decolonial translations of pre-colonial law. It was a platform for discussions of the following papers:
Territory, Yya (lords) and Commoners in Colonial Mixteca Alta: Politics and Religious Meanings
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano (National Institute for History and Anthropology, Mexico City)
Studying Pre-colonial Indigenous Ontologies to Decolonize Law: A Contradiction in Terms? The Example of Indigenous Peoples in Canada
Sandrine Brachotte (Sciences Po Law School, Paris)
Historicising the Legal Preferences for the Oldest in Pre-Colonial African States and Societies
Edward Erhagbe (University of Benin, Benin City) and Idahosa Osagie Ojo (Benson Idahosa University, Benin City)
The Nature of Igbo Indigenous Law
Judith N. Onwubiko (London South Bank University)
Property Regimes, Religious Power, and State Formation: Modern Transformation of the East Asian Region
Kentaro Matsubara (University of Tokyo)
Capacocha, praxis y saber: Los saberes normativos en un ritual inca en el valle del río Chillón prehispánico (ca. 1500–1520s)
Damian Gonzales Escudero (MPI for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main)
Recognizing the Legal Personality of the Magpie River/Mutehekau Shipu in Canada
Uapukun Mestokosho and Yenny Vega Cardenas
Amerindian Perspectivism and Multinaturalism as Models for Rereading the Development of Indigenous Normative Contexts
Andrés Nunes Chaib (Maastricht University)
Decolonial Comparative Law
6-7 October 2020, Virtual workshop
The Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg) and the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law organized a virtual workshop on decolonial comparative law on 6-7 October 2020 (see program).
Co-organizers: Tshepo Madlingozi & Emile Zitzke (University of Witwatersrand) and Ralf Michaels & Lena Salaymeh (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law)