AALS Section on Islamic Law

For the 2021 AALS Annual Meeting

The Section on Islamic Law is pleased to announce a Call for Papers from which one or more presenters will be selected for the section’s program to be held during the AALS 2021 Annual Meeting in San Francisco on the subject of Islamic Law and the Modern International Legal Order. The program description is as follows:

The United States and Europe are awash in ethnic nationalist and quite often protoauthoritarian movements that show some level of contempt for transnational and international law.  From Brexit to America First to Hungary’s identity based Orbanomics, many in the West have turned their back on the idea of international cooperation in favor of localism. The underlying conviction seems to be that local values and local institutions serve the populations of these respective nations better, and therefore they should not subject themselves to foreign arrangements created by others.   These phenomena raise deeper questions respecting the future of the modern international order.  Is there truly an unmanageable tension between a preference, perhaps even a universalist one, for a particular political arrangement and a willingness to subject the state to a higher order set of rules that recognizes that arrangement as only one among many?  This sort of question is hardly new to Islam, which is both traditionally universalist in its conviction that an Islamic political order fulfills the Will of God, and an awareness of the necessity of finding a way to manage relationships with others.   Our panelists will discuss these questions others relating to the relationship of international law and Islamic law, and the manner in which these might prove relevant to an international legal order that finds itself in near existential crisis. 

Papers should be between 7500 and 15,000 words in length, not previously published, and relate to the above topic.  The selected presenter will have the opportunity, but not the obligation, to publish the article in the Arab Law Quarterly if they so desire.  Applicants may be academics or nonacademics at any level and in any relevant discipline.

Papers should be submitted electronically to Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi (hamoudi@pitt.edu) no later than August 14, 2020.  The author of the selected paper will be notified by September 1, 2020.  The Call for Paper presenter will be responsible for paying their registration fee and hotel and travel expenses.   Presenters who do not hold a faculty position at an AALS law school will not be require to pay registration fees.    

Any inquiries for the Call for Papers should be submitted to Professor Hamoudi (hamoudi@pitt.edu).