Reimagining the law: Why a community-focused approach might matter more

The standard image of a constitutional law expert is that of an elderly sage, residing in the uppermost floors of their ivory tower, engaged in a full but sedate programme of hair-splitting. So, please adjust your expectations for Cindy Skach.

There’s no getting around the fact that Skach is a former law professor at King’s College London and the University of Oxford. Nor that she is the author of Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic.

But Skach was also at the centre of a missile attack in Baghdad in 2009, which led to a considerable adjustment in her way of looking at things, outlined in her new book How to Be a Citizen: Learning to Rely Less on Rules and More on Each Other.

Partly prompted by her Iraq experience, the book advances the notion that current law-driven processes are not functioning well, and that more community-centred, ground-level decision-making will provide better results.

What was an academic doing in Iraq in the first place? “I was invited by the Iraqis and Kurds under the auspices of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. And the idea was, let’s bring out some scholars and some practitioners to think about fine-tuning this 2005 constitution.”

She relished the opportunity to talk the walk: “When you’re a professor of constitutional law, when you’ve been working and publishing about these issues as an academic, you really crave and cherish the moments when you can actually have some influence directly on the process of making higher law.”

Less welcome was the missile attack, although it has had positive unintended consequences. “The moment when our camp was hit by the rocket and we had to scramble to get out and so forth really made me reflect, not just on that experience, but on the decades before that.

“I have claimed and admitted that I always felt somewhere that running to the law to fix problems with society, at least the way we had been doing it, was not really the answer.”

But many people survive missile attacks without having their life’s worth of thinking turned upside down. What made her different? Skach prefaces the answer to that question with a caveat: “I was not thrilled starting with that example [of the missile attack] in the book, because it’s very, very sad – people are being blown up all the time, and we’ve got terrible violence across the world.