Asian Law Center

Islamic Law in Context

Islamic law constitutes, to a significant degree, many of the Asian and developing legal systems we study. The Center fulfilled a longstanding strategic aim by recruiting Professor Clark Lombardi to specialize in modern Islamic law and offer courses in Islamic Law and Contemporary Muslim Legal Systems. Since joining the faculty Professor Lombardi established himself as an international expert in Islamic Law and comparative constitutional law. In 2007 the Asian Law Center launched his important book, State Law as Islamic Law in Modern Egypt: The Incorporation of the Shari’a into Egyptian Constitutional Law (Brill, Islamic Law and Society Series 2006). He is completing a Carnegie Grant project comparing the applications of Islamic law in Islamic Asia and working with Afghan legal scholars in the Center’s Afghan Legal Educators Project.

In 2004 we expanded the Center's focus to South Asia in the Afghan Legal Educators Project. This project, funded by the U.S. Department of State, focuses on re-training legal educators in Afghanistan in modern secular and comparative Islamic law. The project underscores our commitment to public service lawyering. The Center was chosen because of faculty’s long experience in training lawyers from developing countries and faculty's practical expertise in Asia, in development law, in commercial law and institutional law reform, and in Islamic Law (Professors Eddy, Lombardi and Taylor).

Professors Clark Lombardi, Michael Feener (National University of Singapore), and Mark Cammack (Southwestern Law School/Asian Law Center) hosted a Workshop on Creating Islamic Lawyers and Judges at NUS in February 2009, analyzing patterns in the teaching of Islamic law in Indonesia and Malaysia as well as the impact of this teaching on court decisions. Developing a picture of changing Islamic legal education for legal professionals in the region is a necessary first step toward understanding how Islamic lawyers and Muslim judges view their own social roles and how Muslim judges formulate their decisions.