Subedi Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation 2021/22 awarded to Jason Roger Brickhill

The Law Faculty is delighted to announce the winner of the Subedi Prize for best doctoral dissertation in the 2021/22 academic year.

The Subedi Prize was established in 2019 thanks to a generous donation from Professor Surya P. Subedi QC. Each academic year, the prize is awarded to the thesis that, in the opinion of the judges, makes the most exciting original contribution to the relevant field of scholarship and is best-crafted in terms of organisation, style and presentation.

The prize for the 2021/22 academic year is awarded to Dr Jason Brickhill for his dissertation “Strategic Litigation in South Africa: Understanding and Evaluating Impact”.

This outstanding project lays out a contribution to a global discussion about whether strategic litigation has any positive impact on public policy, namely, whether the courts have the ‘potential’ to make a ‘material contribution’ to ‘legal, material, and political impact’ that can be deemed valuable (or detrimental). While some views in modern literature deem strategic litigation either to hardly have any impact in terms of such litigation producing ‘significant social reform’ or to be positively harmful overall, the thesis, based on the extraordinarily elaborate case studies, concludes that strategic litigation has the potential to make a positive impact. The case studies each track a decade of litigation on education provisioning and ‘state capture’ in South Africa, and Brickhill drew on over 40 semi-structured interviews with leading activists, politicians, lawyers and experts in these fields as well as budget and other data. Brickhill argues that the potential for impact that rises to the level of social change depends on the litigation environment (notably the substantive and procedural law and legal culture), litigation resources (suitable litigants, legal representation and funding) and litigation decisions (especially as to the model and technical form of litigation).

Upon some further scholarly development, Brickhill’s work is likely not only to result in a ground-breaking monograph but to impact the approach to this type of litigation. The thesis itself is available on the Oxford repository.

On hearing he had won the prize, Jason said:

“I am truly honoured to win the Subedi Prize. My thesis sought to draw together theory, doctrine, empirical research and an understanding of the dynamics of legal practice to make a contribution to a question that matters deeply to me: in what conditions can litigation contribute to social change, to building more equal, just and democratic societies? I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, examiners, Trinity College, my partner, family and friends, and to my companions in the Oxford Human Rights Research Group, as well as all those who provided interviews, data or comment on my work along the way."

Professor John Armour, Dean of the Faculty of Law, said:

"We are thrilled to award the Subedi Prize for the Law Faculty’s best DPhil thesis in 2021-22 to Dr Jason Brickhill. It speaks volumes about our doctoral students and their work that the judges once again had the happy task of reviewing a fantastically strong field of dissertations. We are extremely grateful to Professor Subedi for funding this prize. Many congratulations to Jason and his supervisors Professors Sandy Fredman and Kate O’Regan!"