ABSTRACT
Patrick McAuslan published his first paper on land law in East Africa in 1967 (McAuslan 1967). Over the next thirty-five years he also came to occupy a key position in the world of technical legal consultancy. He published extensively on land law and development. I first encountered McAuslan scholarship in Tanzania in the late 1990s where I had begun field work on women’s relations to land, carrying out fieldwork in the Kagera region. At that time Tanzania was at the beginning of a difficult land reform process and I found the debates on the purpose and direction of land reform, and in particular of land law reform, compelling. My particular interest at the time was in the question of women’s access to land, especially through inheritance, and the first academic paper I pub - lished (Manji 1998) was an analysis of the way that gender concerns had been neglected in the Tanzanian process. In the intervening seventeen or so years, my own thinking about some of the main themes in land law and administration has been deeply informed by reading McAuslan’s scholarship.
