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Full-Text Articles in Law
Religious Minorities And Shari’A In Iraqi Courts, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Religious Minorities And Shari’A In Iraqi Courts, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Articles
There is a rising interest in our academy in the study of constitutional states, particularly in the Islamic world, whose legal and constitutional structure is at least as a formal matter both founded on and subject to religious doctrine. For those of us interested in the Arab spring, and indeed in constitutionalism in much of the Islamic world, this work is not only valuable, but positively vital. Without it, we are unable to discuss most emerging Arab democracies in constitutional terms. In Iraq, and in Egypt after it, two of the premier Arab states which have recently seen constitutions approved …
The Will Of The (Iraqi) People, Haider Ala Hamoudi
The Will Of The (Iraqi) People, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Articles
While there has been much literature on the Iraqi constitution of both the scholarly and popular media variety, attention to contemporary Iraqi judicial decisions, and in particular those of the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court, has been far less pronounced. In fact, my own search has not led me to a single published law review article on the subject. There is some irony to this – it is, after all, rather difficult to address the concept of constitutionalism in any state without reference to constitutional praxis, and the judiciary is, at the very least, an integral participant in that praxis. I …
Ornamental Repugnancy: Identitarian Islam And The Iraqi Constitution, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Ornamental Repugnancy: Identitarian Islam And The Iraqi Constitution, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Articles
Nearly six years after the enactment of Iraq’s final constitution, the Federal Supreme Court of Iraq has yet to render a single ruling respecting the conformity of any law to the “settled rulings of Islam” despite being empowered to do precisely that under Article 2 of the Iraqi Constitution. This so-called repugnancy clause is swiftly devolving from a matter that was of some importance during constitutional negotiations into one that is more symbolic than real – an assertion of identity, primarily of the Islamic variety (though when combined with Article 92, to some extent of the Shi’i Islamic variety) – …
Identitarian Violence And Identitarian Politics: Elections And Governance In Iraq, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Identitarian Violence And Identitarian Politics: Elections And Governance In Iraq, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Articles
This Essay, originally published in a 2010 issue of the Harvard International Law Journal (Online), maintains that it is a mistake to ask whether or not the United States was wise to have "allowed" elections in Iraq as early as it did following its overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003. Such a question presumes an absence of domestic agency that was certainly not the case in Iraq, and is probably not the case in any modern society under occupation. Domestic demands coming from domestic forces seeking to shore up their own power base almost necessitated the outcome of …
Baghdad Booksellers, Basra Carpet Merchants, And The Law Of God And Man: Legal Pluralism And The Contemporary Muslim Experience, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Baghdad Booksellers, Basra Carpet Merchants, And The Law Of God And Man: Legal Pluralism And The Contemporary Muslim Experience, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Articles
There is a crisis in our law schools in the study of Islamic law and the law of the Muslim polities. The current approaches either focus exclusively on national codes to the derogation of other vitally important influences on the legal order, most importantly the body of norms and rules derived from Islamic foundational texts known as the shari'a, or they regard as secondary, and at times irrelevant, the actual legal order of the societies in favor of an academic construction of the theories of medieval Muslim jurists. Neither of these approaches reflects with a necessary degree of accuracy the …
Toward A Rule Of Law Society In Iraq: Introducing Clinical Legal Education Into Iraqi Law Schools, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Toward A Rule Of Law Society In Iraq: Introducing Clinical Legal Education Into Iraqi Law Schools, Haider Ala Hamoudi
Articles
This Article details my experience introducing clinical legal education into three Iraqi law schools. I highlight some of the cultural, legal and logistical obstacles that existed, and the means my colleagues and I used to circumvent them. By and large we considered our project at least modestly successful and certainly garnered the interest of many faculty and nearly all students who participated. Nevertheless, the extent of our success depended largely on the cooperation of the faculty and administration at the law schools with which we worked, and we were able to achieve the most at those institutions where cooperation was …