About the Speaker

Brenna Bhandar is a faculty member at Allard Law, with previous academic positions at SOAS, University of London, Queen Mary School of Law, Kent Law School, and the University of Reading. She has also been a visiting scholar at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris) and Stellenbosch University Faculty of Law (South Africa).

Brenna holds a BA (Hons.) in South Asian Studies and History from the University of Toronto, an LLB from UBC, and a PhD from Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. She was called to the Bar of British Columbia after clerking at the BC Court of Appeal and articling with Arvay Finlay.

Her research spans property law, critical theory, colonial legal history, and critical race feminism. She is the author of Colonial Lives of Property (Duke University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Revolutionary Feminisms (Verso, 2020). A widely published scholar, Brenna is frequently invited to deliver keynote addresses worldwide in diverse academic and interdisciplinary contexts.

Abstract

In this paper, Brenna Bhandar explores the centrality of what she terms pre-emptive legal violence to colonial forms of dispossession and domination. She examines the land law doctrine of pre-emption as it operated in North America in the latter half of the 19th century. As a doctrine central to the appropriation of Indigenous lands and the creation of markets in private property, pre-emption has received less critical attention than other legal justifications for colonialism, such as the doctrines of discovery and conquest. By addressing pre-emption as a colonial juridical innovation, Bhandar challenges several aspects of the political divide between public and private forms of power and offers explanatory value for understanding contemporary political struggles over space and the nation conceived as property and territory.

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