
Professor Foluke Adebisi
LL.M(Lanc.), PhD(Lanc.)
Expertise
Foluke Ifejola Adebisi is a Professor at the Law School, University of Bristol whose scholarship focuses on decolonial thought in legal education and its intersection with a history of changing ideas of the 'human.'
Current positions
Professor of Law
University of Bristol Law School
Contact
Press and media
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Biography
She currently teaches Law and Race, Rich Law Poor Law, as well as Health Law and the Body, and Health Inequalities in Law and Society. She has also taught on Contract Law (both undergraduate and postgraduate), Foundations of Business Law, and law of Tort.
She is the founder and Director of Forever Africa Conference and Events – FACE. She writes about law, Africa, pedagogy and life in general at Foluke's African Skies.
In 2024, she was one of 5 finalists for Oxford University Press’ Law Teacher of the Year Award. Her monograph Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility was published by Bristol University Press in March 2023 and won the Society of Legal Scholars’ Margaret Brazier book prize for Outstanding Mid-Career scholarship in 2024.
Research interests
Law, Africa, African studies, pedagogy, the Higher Education structure, decolonial thought, decolonisation movements, race and gender, legal history, socio-legal theory
Publications
Recent publications
27/05/2025Seeking the university that is ours
The Law Teacher: The international Journal of Legal Education
Can Higher Education be Decolonized?
Can Higher Education be Decolonized?
Explorations towards a racially just jurisprudence of the future
Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction
Introduction: Decolonising the law school: presences, absences, silences… and hope
Decolonisation and the Law School
Decolonisation and the Law School
Decolonisation and the Law School
Teaching
I am a teacher of law, committed to exploring diversity in the content, process and structure of education, especially legal education. I explore the links between power structures, knowledge production, knowledge transmission and inequalities in (global) society. Nowhere is the association between law and society more overt than in legal education. Understanding the postcolonial nature of law helps us trace better connections between race and postcolonial coloniality and the enduring legacy of postcolonial law. European law (as inherited and adopted) has a long history of dispossession and separation. This history lives on in themes of globalisation and development and we run the risk of entrenching, reiterating and reproducing dominant epistemologies in our use and study of law. I explore these ideas by researching legal education in HEIs and encouraging accurate study of the Global South. Systems rise and fall on similar ideologies which impact educational outcomes, employment, and quality of life, for people (especially for women) of colour. Teaching should change the world. I teach for the world I want to see.