Law and Literature and the Novel

By Camilo Gómez-Rivas This is the second in a two-part series on teaching law and literature. The first focused on the classical traditions of law and literature. The relationship between … Continue reading Law and Literature and the Novel

Why I Love Teaching Islamic Law and Literature

By Camilo Gómez-Rivas This is the first of a two-part series on teaching Islamic law and literature. The second part discusses the modern period through a discussion of the novel. … Continue reading Why I Love Teaching Islamic Law and Literature

International Law under the Almoravids

By Camilo Gómez-Rivas This is the second in a two-part series on Law under the Almoravids. The first was a reflection on legal texts as sources for writing social and … Continue reading International Law under the Almoravids

Law under the Almoravids and What Questions You Can Ask Legal Texts

By Camilo Gómez-Rivas This is the first in a two-part series on Law under the Almoravids. The second essay takes up the development of diplomacy and international negotiation. I came … Continue reading Law under the Almoravids and What Questions You Can Ask Legal Texts

Weekend Scholarship Roundup

SCHOLARSHIP ROUNDUP On Islamic Law In "Legitimating Sultanic Rule in Arabic, Turkish and Persian—Late Mamluk Rulers as Authors of Religious Poetry" (in Rulers as Authors in the Islamic World, eds., … Continue reading Weekend Scholarship Roundup

A Murder in a Cordoban Family: The Intertwining of the Theory and Practice of Criminal Law in al-Andalus

By Mohammed Allehbi The history of Islamic criminal justice is not written by its enforcers. In fact, the jurists, judges, and other legal scholars who left us most of the … Continue reading A Murder in a Cordoban Family: The Intertwining of the Theory and Practice of Criminal Law in al-Andalus

Diplomas for Crime and Punishment

By Mohammed Allehbi Despite the lack of surviving archival records from the medieval Islamic world, scribes and other officials would preserve inshāʾ, or administrative documents from the chancery, which they … Continue reading Diplomas for Crime and Punishment

Mirrors for Criminal Magistrates

By Mohammed Allehbi In the medieval Islamic world, shurṭa were overseers of criminal justice, but, paradoxically, the majority were not scholars of the law. The shurṭa was made up of … Continue reading Mirrors for Criminal Magistrates

Detective Stories and Crime Reports

By Mohammed Allehbi Between the eighth and twelfth centuries, military and administrative elites oversaw a complex criminal justice system in the great cities of the Islamic Near East and Mediterranean. … Continue reading Detective Stories and Crime Reports

Skullduggery, Literature, and the Legal Imagination

By Matthew L. Keegan How do we imagine the law? What shapes our sense of how the legal system operates? In a culture saturated with television narratives, one clear avenue … Continue reading Skullduggery, Literature, and the Legal Imagination