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This Lecture will be delivered by Professor Foluke Adebisi, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2026-27. One of the key outcomes of the globalisation of Euro-modern law is the proliferation of a single restrictive vision of being human in the world. According to Anna Grear, this is a vision of the human that is embedded deep within the DNA of law… almost unnoticed. The existence of this artificial construction of the human inter alia dispossesses marginalised populations from within the category "human." Thus, law's human – the reasonable man – can be considered a disembodied thinking machine mainly concerned with profit and optimisation of resources. As such, the corporate form has always seemed a perfect facsimile of this Euro-modern idea of the human. However, in an age in which AI, bio- and necropolitics, and an accelerating climate catastrophe are pervasive, this narrow vision of the human escapes containment as an analytical tool. Nevertheless, resistance movements concerned with justice, within and outside the academy, have long confronted this conundrum of law's dual nature – on the one hand, the promise of freedom; the other, wielding violence. Within legal academia, the concepts of justice, liberation and human rights seem to be continually at war with law's inherent violence, especially as it manifests through structural dispossession from the definition of human – through various histories and legacies of extractive colonisation, indigenous annihilation, racial enslavement and abandonments to disaster. By nature, the law seeks to be predictable and certain while also promising fairness, justice and equity – but only within its own terms, including the preservation of the law's human. In the present, the use of AI presents a particular challenge to our understanding and experience of human sentience, creativity, innovation, intellectual production and ownership, as well as how we balance those things with environmental costs. In this, the effects of disembodiment accelerated by coloniality are either laid bare to those already looking or effaced by those who cannot see. If we are to survive and still be human in the face of necropolitics, climate catastrophe, AI and extreme inequality, what version and vision of the law will lead us to flourishing futures? Who will do the thinking needed for this future: law's human, a word-juggling machine or the human that is perpetually forced into the shadows? This paper addresses this conundrum by asking: Can the law school be a place where being human can even be imagined? Or are we destined to reproduce violence in the facsimile of the law's human that we teach our students? In response, this paper will explore a series of stories and experiments undertaken within the law school as they attempt to rescue the human from the jaws of the colonial machine. The paper will reflect on what these tell us about the possibility and limits of imagination within the law. Can we learn to be human again? Will the law help or hinder our learning? Is another world still possible? "A world of freedom, real justice, balance and shared abundance, a world woven in a new design?"

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