Law Dissertation Prize for Jason Brickhill

Trinity alumnus Jason Brickhill has been awarded the Subedi Prize for best doctoral dissertation in the 2021/22 academic year.

The Subedi Prize was established in 2019 and 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.

Dr Jason Brickhill’s dissertation, “Strategic Litigation in South Africa: Understanding and Evaluating Impact”, 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 concludes that strategic litigation has the potential to make a positive impact.

The case studies in the thesis 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.

On winning the prize, Jason Brickhill said: ‘I am honoured to have been awarded the Subedi Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in law. Trinity College provided me with the wonderful home and community that made my DPhil experience such a joy and enabled me to thrive. I am grateful to everyone who was part of my college life: my fellow students, all the staff of college (especially the scouts and porters and staff in hall and the beer cellar), and the fellows. The law fellows, Nick Barber and Luke Rostill, supported me throughout and actively brought me into the college law community. I am also thankful to Hilary Boulding for her personal support to me.’

Jason Brickhill graduated from Trinity in 2022, and served as MCR president in 2017/18. thesis itself is available on the Oxford repository.