ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on the personal experience of the relationship between radical scholarship and practice. It draws upon my experiences of radical legal education at Dar law school, activist legal practice and subsequently as the chair of the Tanzanian Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters (The Commission) (Tanzania, 1994) to reflect critically upon what we thought were radical legal paradigms. It suggests that in the context of class-divided societies, when our elite, petit-bourgeois background makes us believe in our own wisdom, we have a lot to learn from the masses. Planning legal strategies with our clients and fighting legal battles under procedures adverse to them provided lessons a thousand times more instructive and humbling than grand classroom lectures and faculty seminars. Similarly, serious engagement and learning from ordinary people throughout Tanzania by the Commission enabled us to question the fundamental premises of bourgeois constitutional ideology.
