In this chapter, I argue that during the period of historical colonialism, colonial law consisted of two bodies of law separated by an abyssal line. When speaking of colonial law, one has to have in mind the law issued or accepted by the colonial power to apply in the colonies and govern their relations with the metropolitan centre. In this sense, colonial law consisted of two bodies of law. The first was the set of legislation (court decisions and administrative measures) emanating from the metropolitan government or colonial administration, to be applied in the colonies and in their relations with the metropolitan government. The second referred to laws and regulations that specifically applied to those sectors of native populations that were not “civilised” (the vast majority) or, in other words, those that had not been assimilated into European values, culture, manners and tastes. Both offered striking contrasts with the body of law that applied on metropolitan soil. The crucial topics that separated metropolitan and colonial law: a racial property regime; labour as a branch of criminal law; extreme punitive justice; formal or informal systems of apartheid grounded in settler or white supremacy; suppression or instrumental manipulative recognition of indigenous law. These topics show that metropolitan and colonial legality were (are) the two sides of modern abyssal law.

We should think of our age as a time for a wager and bet on the possibility of a civilisatory alternative. To maximise our chances, an alternative thinking of alternatives is required: the epistemologies of the South. In this chapter, I discuss what such an epistemological move entails for a socio-legal theory of law presenting a blueprint for a new possible way of theorising law in society from the perspective of the epistemologies of the South. Under modern domination, two contradictory legal worlds were born: metropolitan law and colonial law. The most remarkable characteristic of Western-centric domination is that this contradiction, however radical, was (and is) invisible. The specific operations of this dualistic liberal legal order made these two systems incommensurable legal realities and, as such, incapable of being contradictory. After historical colonialism ended, abyssal and non-abyssal forms of social exclusion became different sociabilities, structured by different types and styles of social relations and social interaction. The legal inexistence of abyssal exclusion became both the cause and the effect of the massive impunity afforded to exclusionary behaviour which targeted ontologically degraded populations and robbed them of their basic human dignity. The epistemologies of the South conceive of modern science, including legal science, anthropology, and the sociology of law, as important but incomplete bodies of knowledge whose relevance depends on their contribution to denouncing and eliminating the abyssal lines of exclusion and legal non-being. This contribution in turn depends on linking scientific knowledge with other non-scientific legal and non-legal knowledges, which will often involve intercultural translation. Ecologies of legal knowledges will emerge from this linking and, with them, post-abyssal legal thinking.