Profile
Tanzil Chowdhury is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Public Law at Queen Mary University of London and the Co-Director for the Centre of Law and Society in a Global Context. His research focusses on public law and constitutional reform, drawing on marxist and materialist social theory.
He was previously a Research Fellow at Birmingham Law School, where he assisted on a report examining key provisions of Gibraltar’s 2006 Constitution for the Territory’s Parliamentary Select Committee on Constitutional Reform, and was the President’s Doctoral Scholar at the University of Manchester. He was also a Research Associate at the University of Essex and has held visiting positions at The New School (New York), New York Law School (New York), Hong Kong University (Hong Kong), Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris), Yeshiva University (New York City), and the Université Catholique de Lille (Paris). Tanzil was recently an inaugural Fellow for Friends Of Birzeit University and established a research partnership with the Institute of Law, Birzeit University in Palestine.
Before beginning his job at Queen Mary, Tanzil was a development worker that helped to set up the Greater Manchester Law Centre and was a co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project.
Undergraduate Teaching
- LAW4001 Public Law
- LAW6021 Jurisprudence and Legal Theory
- Queen Mary-Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University Jurisprudence and Legal theory
Tanzil has also taught EU Law, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, and Constitutional Reform.
Research
Tanzil's work is in the fields of law, political economy and Marxism, with a particular focus on Marxist jurisprudence and constitutional/administrative law.
His recent work examined the dispossession of the Chagos Archipelago, or 'executive robbery', which reframes this period as a form of primitive accumulation. He is also working on set of ideas that present constitutional reforms as a type of mediation of social antagonism that reproduces capitalist social relations. His current book project develops a historical materialist exegesis of constitutional settlements in Britain over the last century.
Tanzil has recently co-edited a book titled Legal Workers Inquiry, the first even workers inquiry of legal sector workers in the UK. He has previously written on war powers, British Overseas Territories constitutionalism, and his first monograph was titled ‘Time, Temporality and Legal Judgment’. He maintains an interest in the ‘temporal turn’ in socio-legal studies and legal theory.
Supervision
Tanzil is interested in supervising prospective doctoral candidates with an interest in Law and Marxism, law and political economy, and critical approaches to (public) law.
He currently supervises two doctoral students, Luiza Tavares da Motta and Fernando Quintana.
Public Engagement
Tanzil was a co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project and helped set up the Greater Manchester Law Centre. He currently sits on the Board of Advisors for the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) and is an committee member of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust’s Rights and Justice team, overseeing their education program. He formerly sat on the National Executive Committee of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Tanzil previously worked in the Pro Bono Offices of Singapore’s Subordinate courts, and has spent much time on twinning and teaching projects in the Occupied Palestine Territories. He maintains a commitment to community-oriented and grass roots projects.
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