Disserted

Dunia Zongwe

Description

Disserted is a groundbreaking, comprehensive book that guides LL.B students on how to craft a first-class dissertation. It tackles head-on the triple crisis faced by law students in developing nations - a crisis of doubting, thinking, and writing This crisis manifests itself in the form of poorly written dissertations.
This is the first book to show how to practically assemble a dissertation from the perspective of decoloniality. This makes Disserted uniquely suited to students from the Global South, considering that decoloniality empowers them to overcome the triple crisis. Indeed, its originality in presenting practical advice and decolonial theory sets this book apart from the handful of guides on LL.B dissertations. Existing resources and manuals are filled with generalities and lack in practicality.
Written in student-friendly prose, its 23 chapters cover a wide range of topics. including research proposals, topic selection, purpose and problem statements. literature reviews, digital tools and models powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the basics of legal prompt engineering, plagiarism, grammar, and research methods. Each chapter offers secrets and deep insights, drawing from the author's extensive experience in supervising LL.B dissertations and research papers, notably in Southern Africa and India.
Though primarily targeting LL.B students, Disserted also serves as an essential companion and indispensable resource for supervisors, law professors, jurists, and anyone interested in unraveling the complexities of writing dissertations. Overall, Disserted underscores the importance of structured dissertation writing coupled with a decolonized research approach that subverts dominant perspectives, exposes the role of Al and technology in entrenching the coloniality of knowledge, and fosters a broader understanding of law.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique
• Law

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789956553181
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

how to craft a first-class dissertation. It tackles head-on the triple crisis faced by law students in developing nations – a crisis of doubting, thinking, and writing. This crisis manifests itself in the form of poorly written dissertations.

This is the first book to show how to practically assemble a dissertation from the perspective of decoloniality. This makes Disserted uniquely suited to students from the Global South, considering that decoloniality empowers them to overcome the triple crisis. Indeed, its originality in presenting practical advice and decolonial theory sets this book apart from the handful of guides on LL.B dissertations. Existing resources and manuals are filled with generalities and lack in practicality.

Written in student-friendly prose, its 23 chapters cover a wide range of topics, including research proposals, topic selection, purpose and problem statements, literature reviews, digital tools and models powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the basics of legal prompt engineering, plagiarism, grammar, and research methods. Each chapter offers secrets and deep insights, drawing from the author’s

notably in Southern Africa and India.

Though primarily targeting LL.B students, Disserted also serves as an essential companion and indispensable resource for supervisors, law professors, jurists, and anyone interested in unraveling the complexities of writing dissertations. Overall, Disserted underscores the importance of structured dissertation writing coupled with a decolonized research approach that subverts dominant perspectives, exposes the role of AI and technology in entrenching the coloniality of knowledge, and fosters a broader understanding of law.

Associate Professor, Alliance School of Law, India; and Adjunct Associate Professor, Walter Sisulu University, South Africa. JSD (Cornell); LLM (Cornell); Cert (Univ Montréal); LLB (Univ Namibia); BJuris (Univ Namibia).

DISSERTED

Dunia P. Zongwe

DISSERTED The Secrets of Writing a First-Class LL.B Dissertation Dunia P. Zongwe

L a ng a a R esea rch & P u blishing CIG Mankon, Bamenda

Publisher: LangaaRPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [e-mail] www.langaa-rpcig.net Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective [e-mail] www.africanbookscollective.com

ISBN-10: 9956-553-89-1

ISBN-13: 978-9956-553-89-1 ©Dunia P. Zongwe 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher

About the Author Dunia Prince Zongwe is an author, an academic and a consultant.He currently works as an Associate Professor at Alliance School of Law, India, and as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Walter Sisulu University (WSU), South Africa. Having passed his own LL.B dissertation with distinction, Zongwe has supervised 53 LL.B dissertations, several of which received an ‘A’ grade or earned the highest marks in their entire law school. And, through his consultancy work for a Sydney-based educational firm, he provided – from February 2022 to June 2023 – formative feedback to about 1,000 students at primarily Australian universities on their written assignments. Zongwe specializes in finance, the economic analysis of law, development, decoloniality, and higher education, focusing on Africa and the Global South. He has written extensively in those fields. His research has been cited more than 200 times by various scholars and international organizations, and it has been published in a number of law reviews, including theAmerican University International Law Review (forthcoming),SADC Law Journal, Israel Law Review, Southern African Public Law,andPeking University Journal of Legal Studies. A World Bank consultant since 2013, Zongwe has carried out consulting work in projects run by UNESCO; the Namibian Labor Ministry; Oxford University Press (International Law in Domestic Courts) and New York University (GlobaLex). Since 2008, Zongwe has presented lectures at about 70 conferences at many universities and institutions, including the University of Cape Town, Yale University, the African Union, and the University of Amsterdam. Zongwe received several merit scholarships and awards, including notably a ‘Highly Productive Researcher’ award from WSU in 2022, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC, South Africa) runner- up Certificate of Excellence for Best Presenter award in 2016, the Law Society of Namibia Prize for Best LL.B. Student in 2007, and the University of Namibia Vice-Chancellor’s Medal (twice). Zongwe studied at the University of Namibia, Université de Montréal and Cornell University, where he earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees in law. In 2021, he obtained with distinction a certificate in postgraduate supervision (higher education) from Rhodes University.

Table of Contents Before I start… ..................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Let’s get started! ................................................. 9 Chapter 2: The obstacles you’ll face at your university ............................................................. 17 Chapter 3: Your research proposal: your dissertation roadmap ....................................................... 25 Chapter 4: Find a topic......................................................... 33 Chapter 5: What you should expect from your supervisor................................................................. 47 Chapter 6: Formulate the general purpose and design your dissertation ........................................... 61 Chapter 7: What problems do you address in your dissertation?......................................................... 83 Chapter 8: Which theory informs your approach to the main problem?....................................... 95 Chapter 9: Survey the literature............................................ 111 Chapter 10: Use the Internet and digital tools ..................... 127 Chapter 11: Chat out your research (prompt engineering) ...................................................... 139 Chapter 12: Decolonize your mind....................................... 157 Chapter 13: Put forth strong arguments or hypotheses ....... 169 Chapter 14: Tell me what makes your research significant.......................................................... 187

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Chapter 15: Which methods will you use? ........................... 197 Chapter 16: Structure your dissertation................................ 217 Chapter 17: Your chapters .................................................... 231 Chapter 18: Write clearly ...................................................... 245 Chapter 19: Follow the rules of grammar............................. 159 Chapter 20: Cite, cite, cite… and avoid plagiarism ............. 271 Chapter 21: Format the text and set the layout .................... 287 Chapter 22: Manage your time effectively ........................... 295 Chapter 23: And before you go…......................................... 303

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Before I start… I noticed that one of her footnotes mentions a source: “Muna Ndulo and James T Gathii,International Criminal Law: Cases and Materials (2017).” Intrigued, I quickly Google the source on my phone to verify it. A few minutes afterward, during the question-and-answer session, 1 I ask Anika to show us on the lecture hall’s giant Internet-connected screen where she’s gotten that source from. It’s a sweltering mid-June day in Bangalore. A fellow colleague and I are orally examining the seminar papers on international criminal law written by 14 students supervised by my colleague. Two students have already presented their work. Anika is the third one. Anika goes to the hall’s computer on the podium and tries to demonstrate the origin of her source. Unbeknownst to Anika, Muna Ndulo chaired my doctoral supervision committee. He supervised my doctoral thesis and, for more than a year, I worked under him as a Research Assistant. James Gathii is a noted academic from Loyola University Chicago that I know personally and with whom I’ve interacted on several occasions. In short, I am quite familiar with the type of research they conduct, if only because we’ve kept in touch; and that’s how I can tell that these two prominent and accomplished jurists aren’t likely to approach international criminal law questions in the manner the title of Anika’s footnote presented it: Actually, Ndulo tends to concentrate on development aspects in the way he deals with questions of law, including international criminal law, while Gathii’s unique contribution to legal scholarship revolves around international economic law, especially the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), of which he’s a leading theorist. Despite her best efforts, Anika is failing to trace – through the Internet or her PowerPoint slides – the source she’s cited in her paper. Neither her stoic posture nor the fan hanging overhead on the ceiling can hide the beads of sweat trickling down her forehead. This true story reveals to us in dramatic fashion two major dangers looming from this era of artificial intelligence (AI): the explosion of misinformation and the mushrooming of fake sources. Anika’s case 1 Not her real name.

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isn’t an isolated incident; nowadays, fake sources plague the LL.B dissertations, assignments, and seminar papers that students submit to their lecturers across law schools. Back in 2019 when I first toyed with the idea of a book that would share tips with LL.B students on how they could write their final-year theses, often called ‘dissertations’, I was motivated by a very practical goal: showing in concrete steps how they could write their dissertations from start to finish. From 2015 to 2018, I was observing that, despite the research methodology class that LL.B students had to take in the Faculty of Law (now, ‘School of Law’) at the University of Namibia (UNAM), my students really struggled to smoothly progress through the stages of their research and dissertations. The research methodology class that students had to take one year prior to their final-year dissertation had the big advantage of requiring them to produce a workable research proposal, giving them a headstart for their final year’s dissertations. Having gone through that research methodology class myself, I recognize how much that course benefited students, and I learned quite a bit from the course 2 coordinator, Dr. Margaret Munalula (today the President of the Constitutional Court of Zambia). Together with the dissertation that they have to produce in the final year, the research methodology class is probably the main reason why students from UNAM appeared generally better prepared than their LL.B counterparts in South Africa and India to undertake postgraduate legal research. But prior experience with a research methodology class, however beneficial, does not suffice to arm students with the skills they need to outshine in their dissertations. True, each year I spent supervising at UNAM, at least one of my students would earn a distinction. But this doesn’t change the fact that, despite my guidance, my students and those supervised by my colleagues at UNAM would struggle to demonstrate skills that my colleagues and I considered basic. Though the research methodology class did well, there was a good reason why it didn’t do enough – and that’s the same reason why books on legal research or the writing of dissertations under-prepare students: They teach legal methods, not the practicalities of crafting a thesis or a dissertation. For example, P. Ishwara Bhat’sIdea and

2 After her stint as a Senior Lecturer at UNAM, Dr. Munalula got promoted to a full professorship, then became the first female Dean of the School of Law at the University of Zambia before she joined the Constitutional Court. 2

3 Methods of Legal Researchone of the most informative books on is legal research that I’ve ever come across, but it doesn’t show you how you could title your dissertation, find or select a topic or a theory to frame your dissertation and your core research problem, design your purpose statement, organize the chapters of your dissertation, underscore the special significance of your research and its findings, or simply to format your dissertation. Another related reason for under-prepared LL.B students concerns the generality of those books. With the notable exception 4 of Salter & Mason’sWriting Law Dissertationsand Laura 5 Lammasniemi’sLaw Dissertations,those books teach legal research skills as though all pieces of legal research looked the same and adhered to the same ‘one-size-fits-all’ format. In fact, as a discipline, law is known for the great variety of the structures that its research 6 papers adopt. Particularly, LL.B dissertation is not a generic term for legal research; it’s a distinct genre. And a genre that calls for unique and different ways of tackling it. Nonetheless, more profound reasons explain why so many LL.B students sweat and yet still fail to produce decent or outstanding dissertations. Informed by the theory of decoloniality and the humanizing pedagogy that steer this whole book, I’ve come to realize over the years that the subpar, poorly written dissertations stem from a triple crisis: a crisis of doubting and a crisis of thinking, which have ripened into and which manifest today as a crisis of writing. At a fundamental level, the coloniality of legal education in virtually all of the Global South means that, instead of developing independent, indigenous, and authentic manners of doubting, law students have been trained by lecturers schooled in doctrinal, ‘black- letter law’ to absorb and merely parrot ideas and values that 7 ‘privileged voices’ in Europe and North America have originated. As a result, law students in developing countries go through their

3 P Ishwara Bhat,Idea and Methods of Legal Research(Oxford University Press 2019). 4 Michael Salter and Julie Mason,Writing Law Dissertations: An Introduction and Guide to Conduct Legal Research(Pearson 2007). 5 Laura Lammasniemi,Law Dissertations: A Step-by-Step Guide(Routledge 2018). 6 Helen Sword,Stylish Academic Writing(Harvard University Press 2012) 18 (finding that, out of a sample of 50 law articles, 96% displayed unique or hybrid structures). 7 See Terry Hutchinson and Nigel Duncan, ‘Defining and Describing What We Do: Doctrinal Legal Research’ (2012) 17 Deakin Law Review 83, 117 (stating that the doctrinal method relies on ‘privileged voices’). 3