Legal scholar who promoted land reform in the developing world and helped create a radical law school at Warwick University
The legal scholar Patrick McAuslan, who has died aged 76, promoted land reform throughout English-speaking Africa. By strengthening the protection of traditional land tenure, these reforms overthrew the old colonial structures that had been retained at independence. They empowered millions of ordinary citizens by giving them the right to participate in land-use decisions, enhancing the security of their land rights, and legislating to ensure women's rights both to acquire land and participate in communal decision-making.
In 1996 Patrick was commissioned to convert Tanzania's ambitious, but also ambiguous and contradictory, national land policy into legislation. This massive exercise, resulting in two Acts of more than 800 pages, was completed with great efficiency, becoming a model that was later adopted in Uganda and South Sudan.
The reforms placed the management of rural lands in the hands of 11,000 village councils that form the backbone of Tanzanian society and granted women equal rights in those councils. It significantly reduced corruption in land transactions and considerably enhanced the protection given to forestry and game reserves. However, Patrick was well aware that the technicalities of drafting of these reforms could never be entirely separated from the contentious politics of land rights in the post-colonial world.
He had first arrived in Tanzania in 1961 as a newly graduated lecturer helping to establish a law school at the University of Dar es Salaam. This early experiment in developing an indigenous, socially relevant programme of legal education for the newly independent country opened his eyes to the limitations of his own legal education at Oxford. He was to carry this experience with him on his return to the UK, playing a leading role in founding new law schools at Warwick University and Birkbeck, the University of London's provider of evening courses, shaping the distinctive character of each through his commitment to the promotion of social justice through law.
After a brief period as a lecturer at the LSE (1966-68), he was enticed to Warwick by the prospect of helping to create a law school dedicated to breaking with tradition and teaching law in its social and economic context. Promoted to professor in 1974, he stayed there until 1986, by which time he had transformed teaching and scholarship in the fields of land, property and planning law. Students were encouraged to view land law through the lens of deprivation and disadvantage. Warwick's challenging and radical curriculum helped shape a new type of law graduate, one that might want to work in law centres rather than in big City firms.
Patrick's editorship of a new series of legal monographs (Modern Legal Studies) and a new journal, Urban Law & Policy, providing the showcase for this new approach. In 1980, Paddy Mac, as his students called him behind his back (a name that could not have suited him less), published his landmark monograph, The Ideologies of Planning Law.
This maintained that, far from being a neutral medium for policy implementation, the law might be used to promote various competing objectives. Through wide-ranging studies on slum clearance, city-centre redevelopment, major infrastructure projects and countryside protection, Patrick showed how the philosophy of private property protection tended to prevail over the advancement of public interest and how the aim of promoting public participation was invariably marginalised.
In 1986, Patrick took up the chair of public law chair at LSE, but he never really settled. He was uncomfortable with the prevailing political culture in Britain, and when the opportunity came to take a senior role in the UN-Habitat Urban Management Programme in Nairobi (1990-93) he jumped at it.
He had always advocated the need for post-colonial land reform and from the late 1980s this became his primary purpose. For this reason he left LSE but retained an academic link first with University College London, and then in 1993 at the newly established law school at Birkbeck, where he played the role of eminence grise to younger, more assertively radical post-modern scholars.
As an adviser on land reform, Patrick came into his own. Much of his work was in Africa, but it also included projects in Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific and eastern Europe. He worked in more than 35 countries in the developing world. His services were so valued because he could move effortlessly between policy advice and technical drafting, and because of his sensitivity to local conditions.
In 2001, he was made an MBE for services to African land use and environment. But the real reward lay in the admiration and respect he won from countless officials and politicians with whom he worked and the realisation that he had helped to bring about reforms that improved the lives of so many.
Born in Bournemouth, Patrick suffered the death of his mother at the age of seven; his father was John McAuslan, a City financier. Patrick went to Shrewsbury school, where he joined such friends and contemporaries as Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Paul Foot on a well-trodden path on to Oxford.
Whereas they forged careers in satirical and radical journalism, Patrick seemed to have embarked on a more traditional path. Yet his academic career was, in its own way, to prove equally radical. Outwardly conventional and in many respects an intensely private, shy and modest man, he had a wry sense of humour, which could be cutting in the face of pomposity.
Patrick was working in Kuwait until a week before his death. He is survived by his wife, Dorrette, whom he married in 1968, and their daughter, Fiona.
• John Patrick William Buchanan McAuslan, legal scholar and law reformer, born 19 January 1937; died 11 January 2014