The Jurisprudence of Decolonization: The Postcolonial Career of D. N. Pritt and the Labor of Insurgent Lawyering

Abstract:Following the postcolonial career of the British lawyer, Denis Nowell Pritt across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, this article excavates the largely unheralded ways insurgent lawyers representing anti-colonial and opposition movements across the decolonizing British Empire developed a toolbox of shared legal strategies, techniques and precedents to resist and transform colonial legal inheritances. Shifting from histories of international treaties and national legislation to the labor and practice of lawyering makes visible a transnational jurisprudence of decolonization s produced before local courts in Guyana, India, Kenya and Singapore and sustained by local communities and lawyers.