In France, as in continental Europe, the analysis of law through the lens of race (understood as an analytical category) is struggling to impose itself. The discussion aims to explain the reasons for such a void as well as the ways in which it would be possible to serenely address these issues.
Lionel Zevounou is an Associate Professor of public Law at University of Paris Nanterre. He teaches European administrative Law, Economic Law, administrative law and Public Administration. His doctoral thesis concerns European competition law and legal theory from a critical point of view (Les usages de la notion de concurrence en droit, Paris, LGDJ, 2012). He worked on a project funded by the French Ministry of Budget (2013-2017) on public accountability reform (European Public Sector Accounting Standard) published under the supervision of Sébastien Kott (dir.), Droit et comptabilité publique. La spécificité des comptes publics, Paris, Economica, 2017).
Since 2018, he has been appointed for five years to the Institut universitaire de France. He is now working on the relationship between race and law, particularly the tensions generated by the universalist claim of French law and colonial domination through the category of assimilation. From the semester of 2020, he will teach an interdisciplinary seminar with Abdellali Hajjat (University Libre de Bruxelles) and Silyane Larcher (CNRS) on the relationship between race, law and social sciences at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS, France). From 2019 to 2020 he is appointed as Senior Visiting Scholar at Yale Law School.
