Why is teaching law contextually important, and how might it be done? Such questions have had an important role in legal study since at least 1970, when the Law in Context series was launched with the aim of broadening the study of law. Textbooks were always included as a key part of the project of the series: to treat law and legal phenomena critically in their cultural, social, political, technological, environmental, and economic contexts. Yet over the five decades that have passed since then, it has been less common to offer a critical exploration of contextual legal pedagogy itself. This special issue of the International Journal of Law in Context, co-edited by us and Kenneth A. Armstrong, speaks to this important lacuna, with all eight of the papers within it seeking to interrogate all three elements in the title: ‘context’, ‘pedagogy’, and ‘law’.

It is sometimes thought that to contextualise is to isolate – to quarantine some time-space capsule in the past, and to consider it as much as possible in light of its own specific historical and geographic contexts, thereby deliberately creating a chasm between those contexts and our own. Alternatively, one might think of contextualising as adding a supplement to the already and always prioritised text, aiming – as the Law in Context series blurb has it – to be ‘more stimulating and more revealing than the bare exposition of legal rules’. The papers in this collection all push the boundaries of what it means to contextualise, going beyond those two ways of thinking about context, and probing new possibilities. For many of the papers, to contextualise is to relate, and to relate generatively, in ways also that open up new critical avenues and offer new routes for collaboration across disciplines. Their authors thereby seek to recover a world-making, critical, and generative practice of contextualising – not objective historicising, not supplementing great texts, but instead re-framing and re-making whole areas of law, relating them to a wide range of phenomena, and reflecting on how persons experience them, and with what effects on their lives.

As much as the papers seek to excavate a different – and newly radical – politics of contextualisation, they also interrogate pedagogy, and they do so down to the smallest details of teaching practice. What are the specific challenges of teaching law contextually today? Different areas of the law carry different problems (to note that is already to contextualise legal pedagogy), and new challenges arise as circumstances change (for example, teaching during the pandemic). Further, the seemingly smallest changes in assessment can have large repercussions on one’s very understanding of a certain legal domain. Can one laugh, with one’s students, about law, even when teaching the very serious subject of  sexual violence in India and, if so, how can one assess reflections on the comedy of law? Assessment can also be flipped the other way, with the teacher assessed by the students: should one, for instance, justify one’s pedagogical choices to one’s students, and make oneself vulnerable to their criticisms concerning one’s reading choices in a jurisprudence course? More generally, how can one take ‘place’ seriously in one’s legal teaching – indeed, what if one begins with the very notion of ‘place’ when teaching, say, Food Law? And how about ‘time’: can one teach law with one eye on its futures, and the futures of our planet?

Law, too, is interrogated in this process. Indeed, one of the points made by these papers, taken collectively, is that to theorise legal pedagogy is also to theorise law. Thinking about how to teach law can be an effective way of raising some of the most difficult questions one can ask about law, and its relationship to ethics and politics. Teaching private and public international law, one has to decide how to relate law and power, and what attitude to take, or what attitudes to explore, to the role and value of those areas of law in political life: does one emphasise cynicism, and explore law as a technique of domination, exploitation, and extermination, or does one introduce hope, and consider law also as a technique of resistance, defiance, and rebellion? To take another example: in teaching family law, how does one relate economic history to the history of the family, and where does law fit into that historical entanglement? Given that to contextualise is to relate, and that pedagogical reflection focuses the mind, theorising contextual legal pedagogy offers important yet underexplored possibilities for asking large and difficult questions about law itself.

Maksymilian Del Mar is Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Artefacts of Legal Inquiry (Hart, 2020), and the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (2020). He is one of the editors of the Law in Context series at Cambridge University Press. He also edits the ‘Encounters with Books from Other Disciplines’ series at the International Journal of Law in Context.

Sally Sheldon is Professor of Law at the University of Bristol and the University of Technology Sydney, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.  Her most recent book, The Abortion Act 1967: a Biography of a UK Law is shortly to be published in the Law and Context series, which she now co-edits with Professors Armstrong and Del Mar.  She is an editor of the journal, Social & Legal Studies.