I study law and justice in colonial and postcolonial Uganda. My work draws on two judicial archives I discovered in Kampala: the High Court of Uganda, whose records are in English, and the Mengo Court, Buganda's principal native court, whose records are in Luganda. Together they hold over 150,000 case files spanning nearly a century of legal proceedings.
The questions that drive my research concern how people who were not lawyers, not colonial officials, and not elites understood and used the law. What did they expect from courts? How did they argue their cases? What ideas about truth, obligation, and social repair shaped their testimony and the judgments they received?
Vernacular concepts in Luganda like amazima (truth), obwenkanya (justice), and emirembe (peace) shaped how justice was administered in native courts. As analytical categories, they force us to confront the presence of multiple, even conflicting traditions within the law, rather than setting them aside as cultural background or deciding which tradition counts as the real law.
I also lead research on classification, punishment, and access to rehabilitation within correctional systems in the United States, as part of the Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration. That work examines how institutions govern marginalized people and how rules are applied in practice.
I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where I was a Mellon/ACLS Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar, and an M.A. from Makerere University in Kampala. I serve as Associate Editor of the African Journal of Legal Studies.