phd international law harvard

International Relations

The study of International Relations in the Harvard Department of Government examines the sources of conflict and cooperation in world affairs. Through analysis of foreign policy and public opinion, strategic interaction, international law, and the role of transnational actors, scholars of international relations address a wide array of topics including:

• International finance
• Human rights
• Climate change 

Scholars in the field draw on a diverse tool kit that includes formal, quantitative and qualitative methods.

Department Faculty

Alastair iain johnston.

Christina Davis

Christoph Mikulaschek

Dustin Tingley

Jeffry Frieden

Joshua D. Kertzer

Latanya Sweeney

Michael J. Hiscox

Stephen Chaudoin

Stephen Peter Rosen

Timothy Colton

• Harvard University
• Provost's Office
• Vice Provost for International Affairs
• One Harvard, One World
• Worldwide Week at Harvard
• Administrative Support
• The World at Harvard
• Harvard in the World
• Join Us at Harvard

Harvard Worldwide

Harvard law school (hls), harvard law school program on international law and armed conflict.

Drawing on its world-class faculty and its extraordinary students, the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (HLS PILAC) provides a space for research on critical challenges facing the various fields of public international law related to armed conflict — including the jus ad bellum, the jus in bello (international humanitarian law/the law of armed conflict), international human rights law, international criminal law, the law of state responsibility, and other relevant fields. In collaboration with student researchers, scholars, and practitioners, we engage with

• Read more about Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict

Harvard Gender Violence Project

The overarching goal of the Harvard Gender Violence Project is to elevate the status of South Asian women by engaging societies to reject violence and foster respect for all people. The Harvard Gender Violence Project (HGVP) is a collaboration between The Mittal Institute, Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, and regional experts working in the area of gender violence prevention and intervention programs.

• Read more about Harvard Gender Violence Project

Human Rights Program

The Human Rights Program was founded in 1984 as a center for human rights scholarship. It later expanded to include an International Human Rights Clinic. Today, our faculty and staff include scholars and practitioners with decades of experience in the field. Seven members of our team teach at the Law School; an equal number supervise clinical projects each year. As part of the broader human rights community at Harvard, we work closely with other faculty, numerous graduate students, and research centers at the Law School and University.

• Read more about Human Rights Program

Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics was established in 2005 to promote interdisciplinary analysis and legal scholarship on the most pressing questions facing health care, the health care system, and those who are a part of it....

Institute for Global Law and Policy

The Institute for Global Law and Policy seeks to nurture innovative approaches to addressing the problems of global poverty, conflict, injustice, and inequality through the study of law and the reform of law and legal institutions.

East Asian Legal Studies

Founded in 1965, the East Asia Legal Studies program examines the law and legal history of the nations and peoples of East Asia and their interaction with the United States.

Center on the Legal Profession

The Center on the Legal Profession seeks to contribute to the modern practice of law by increasing understanding of the structures, norms, and dynamics of the legal profession worldwide

Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs

Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center

1350 Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, Massachusetts 01238 USA

• Accessibility  

The Juris Doctor (J.D.) is a three-year program that first gives students the intellectual foundations for legal study, and then gives them the opportunity to focus their studies on areas of particular interest through advanced classes, clinics, and writing projects.

The Master of Laws (LL.M.) is a one-year advanced degree program for students who have already received their first law degrees. It attracts intellectually curious candidates of diverse backgrounds from 65+ countries, including lawyers working at firms or NGOs, government officials, law teachers, judges, activists, doctoral students, entrepreneurs, diplomats, and others.

Harvard Law School’s most advanced law degree, the Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) is modeled on the very best Ph.D. programs in other disciplines, and is designed for aspiring legal academics who, through sustained independent study, research and writing, work to produce a dissertation that constitutes a substantial and valuable contribution to legal scholarship.

Students interested in combining legal education with advanced training in a field not covered by one of the Law School’s formal joint degree programs can consider completing the J.D. program concurrently with another graduate degree program at Harvard University or another institution. In the past, students have arranged concurrent degree programs with the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard Divinity School, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

International Legal Studies

At harvard law school.

Meet the 2022 Chayes International Public Service Fellows

The Chayes International Public Service Fellowships , dedicated to the memory of Professor Abram Chayes ’49, provide Harvard Law School students with the opportunity to spend eight weeks during the summer working abroad with governmental or non-governmental organizations concerned with issues of an international scope or relevant to countries in transition. This summer, 15 Chayes Fellows will work with organizations based in 11 countries.

Read about the 2022 Chayes Fellows here

Summer international travel pre-departure dessions

Cravath fellows explore international, foreign, and comparative law abroad.

Read more on Harvard Law Today

Photo:  Lorin Granger

HLS team advances in the Philip C. Jessup International Moot Court Competition

Seated, L to R: Marta Canneri ’22, Katherine Shen ’22, Hannah Sweeney ‘24 Standing, L to R: Nanami Hirata ’23, Shayan Khan LL.M. ’22, Stephanie Gullo ‘22

Harvard Law School’s team has won the national round of the 2021-2022  Philip C. Jessup International Moot Court Competition  and will advance to the international rounds, to be held from March 24 through April 10. The Harvard Law team, comprised of J.D. students Marta Canneri ’22, Katherine Shen ’22, Stephanie Gullo ’22, Nanami Hirata ’23 and Hannah Sweeney ’24, and coached by LL.M. student Shayan Khan LL.M. ’22, competed against teams representing 84 other U.S. law schools on a case involving disinformation and the freedom of expression, botnet takedowns, the secession of part of a nation’s territory, and foreign election interference. The memorials (written briefs) submitted by the Harvard team were ranked third out of the 85 submissions.

Info session: Semester Abroad

The HLS  Semester Abroad  program offers J.D. students the opportunity, during their 2L or 3L year, to study law and live in a foreign country, through an exchange program at one of 10 foreign law schools or by designing an independent semester abroad at any foreign law school that meets the program’s requirements.

Come learn about semester abroad from ILS staff and an HLS student who recently  studied abroad.

Tuesday, March 29  at 12:45 p.m. | WCC 3015 Sponsored by International Legal Studies

IGLP Visiting Researchers

The following scholars are affiliated with the IGLP for all or part of the 2023-2024 academic year.

2023-2024 Researchers

Yifeng Chen

Yifeng Chen joins the IGLP as an Associate Professor at Peking University Law School. His research aims to develop a historical account of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in its promotion of industrialism as both a desired form of economic life as well as a legitimate institution for labour governance. By focusing on labour protection through regulating the industrial conditions and industrial relations, the ILO invented itself profoundly an industrial, economic organization, as much as a humanitarian one.

His project mainly employs historical studies including research into the archives of the ILO as well as its official documents. In addition, the project, being interdisciplinary by nature, will also look into sociological studies, economics and political philosophy.

Petter Danckwardt

Petter Danckwardt is a PhD student in international law at Örebro University. His doctoral project focuses on recognition of states and governments in international law. He has taught international law and constitutional law at Stockholm and Uppsala University and has previously worked as a law clerk at Södertörn District Court and as a case officer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He holds an LLM from Stockholm University and a master’s degree in political philosophy from Södertörn University.

Javier Garcia Amez

Javier Garcia Amez joins the IGLP as an Assistant Professor in Criminal Law at Oviedo University. He holds a Bachelor in Law (Oviedo University, 2005) and PhD in Law (Oviedo University, 2014). He has been a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School, Konstanz University (Germany), and Yale Law School (USA). He has published two books, book chapters (23), and articles (26) in topics such as Environmental Law, Criminal Law, and Gender Violence. At this moment, his research is focused on psychological harm to women and coercive control.

Anaïs Mattez

Anaïs Mattez is a PhD candidate and researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), School of Law. Her research explores the restitution of cultural objects and the decolonisation of heritage more generally. In her doctoral dissertation, she analyses the ideological undertones and political influences surrounding the implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention. During her stay at IGLP, she plans to explore critical approaches to cultural property.

Claudia San Martin Rodriguez

Claudia San Martin graduated in Law at the Complutense University of Madrid and holds an LL.M. in Intellectual Property Law from the Carlos III University of Madrid. She is a researcher and PhD student at Complutense University of Madrid and has been a legal consultant in the Digital Transformation department at the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), working on the IP Register in Blockchain project. Previously, she has been a legal consultant at Grant Thornton Madrid and training manager at the Santander Financial Institute (Banco Santander), in projects related to Blockchain.

Claudia is specialized in data protection and intellectual property, and has been lawyer for the brands Hackett, Tommy Hilfiger and Pepe Jeans London in Spain and Portugal. She is currently focused on research on this matter and Blockchain and during her stay at the IGLP she will analyze its applicable regulations in the US and Europe.

Adriane Sanctis de Brito

Adriane Sanctis is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School’s IGLP (2023-2024). She is a co-founder of LAUT, a Brazilian think tank focused on authoritarianism. She holds a PhD from the University of São Paulo (USP) and was previously a professor (adjunct) at its International Relations Institute. She taught critical legal theory, comparative constitutionalism, and international law.

She researches the international histories of legal imagination related to peace, humanitarianism, and the suppression of the slave trade. Her book Seeking Capture, Resisting Seizure: An International Legal History of the Anglo-Brazilian Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade (1826-1845) is forthcoming in the Max Planck Institute’s “Global Perspectives on Legal History” series. She worked on the research that led to her book while she was a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Luxemburg and at the University of Helsinki. At LAUT, she has headed projects examining how contemporary reactionary movements reimagine and reconfigure legal language and human rights.

Adam Strobejko

Adam Strobeyko is a Visiting Researcher working on the topics of R&D for biometric devices and the regulation of Genomic Sequencing Data (GSD) sharing platforms. He holds a PhD in International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute (with distinction), a MA degree in International Public Management from Sciences Po Paris, and an LLB in European Law from Maastricht University.

Prior to joining IGLP, Adam was a Global Fellow at Guarini Global Law & Tech, NYU Law, and a doctoral researcher at the Global Health Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute, where he worked on issues related to countermeasure R&D, One Health, Access and Benefit Sharing and the Pandemic Treaty negotiations. Adam’s research focuses on the relation between public policy and innovation, and he is particularly interested in the role of expertise and novel regulatory approaches in global health law.

Nicole Stybnarova

Nicole Stybnarova is an Assistant Professor of International Law at Leiden University (Faculty of Global Governance and Affairs). Her PhD, completed at the University of Helsinki (Erik Castrén Insitute), addressed the regulation of marriage in Migration Law and Private International Law and its functioning in the global structure of wealth accumulation. Prior to joining Leiden University, she was a lecturer in International Law and Forced Migration at the University of Oxford (Refugee Studies Centre).

Nicole published multiple articles addressing topics at the intersections of migration law, IHRL, private international law, feminism, and political economy. She came to the IGLP to work on her current project which focuses on International Law and women’s social movements. She will study how women and their advocates used historically economic, feminist and international legal arguments to formulate their objectives for social emancipation and to have those advanced with international regulation.

Previous Researchers by Year

2022-2023 | 2021-2022 | 2020-2021 | 2019-2020 | 2018-2019 | 2017-2018 | 2016-2017 | 2015-2016

  2014-2015 | 2013-2014 | 2012-2013 | 2011-2012 | 2010-2011 | 2009-2010 | 2008-2009

PhD in Public Policy

In this section.

• Economics Track
• Judgment and Decision Making Track
• Politics and Institutions Track
• Science, Technology and Policy Studies Track
• Current Students
• Doctoral Student Handbook
• Dissertations & Job Placements
• PhD Student Life
• Faculty & Research

As an exceptional scholar, you want an exceptional graduate program.

The PhD in Public Policy (PPOL) program provides the advanced graduate training you need to successfully launch yourself into a research or related position in academia, government, a nongovernmental organization, or the private sector. 

You will get the training you need to conduct analytical research, help shape and execute policy, and teach the next generation of educators, researchers, and practitioners. The program encourages scholarly research that empowers public policy practitioners like you to make informed decisions and be leaders in their fields. 

Finding firm grounding for research in environmental economics

PPOL PhD alumnus Todd Gerarden’s fascination with bike mechanics mingled with his love of cycling and the outdoors; what emerged was a budding interest in energy and environmental policy. An undergraduate professor suggested he read  Economics of the Environment,  a collection of selected readings edited by HKS professor  Robert N. Stavins . That suggestion changed the course of his career.

Todd Gerarden PPOL PhD 2018

The complete phd.

The PPOL admits students to one of four tracks: Economics ; Judgment and Decision Making ; Politics and Institutions ; and Science, Technology and Policy Studies .    

PPOL graduates enter the workplace prepared to teach, carry out research, and make a profound impact in academia, while for others the degree leads to productive careers in think tanks, multinational organizations, NGOs, or the private sector.

"I've joined two research labs at HKS: Jennifer Lerner's and Julia Minson's. The brainstorming, feedback, and mutual pursuit of important research that comes from working in the labs is truly fulfilling."

Brad dewees ppol phd 2019, doctoral program admissions, funding your doctoral education.

Islamic Legal Studies

at Harvard Law School

A Focus on Islamic Law

Faculty profiles.

Harvard Law School has a number of faculty members with academic pursuits and scholarship in the field of Islamic Law.

Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard and Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law . In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution.

Naz K. Modirzadeh is the founding Director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (HLS PILAC) . In May 2016, she was appointed as a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. At HLS PILAC, Modirzadeh is responsible for overall direction of the Program, contributing to its cutting-edge research initiatives and briefing senior decision-makers.

Intisar A. Rabb , a leading expert on Islamic Law and legal history, joined the faculty of Harvard Law School on January 1, 2014 as Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Program in Islamic Law . Rabb most recently was associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Law at New York University School of Law, where she held a joint appointment at the NYU Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department and the NYU School of Law.

Kristen A. Stilt is Professor of Law and also Faculty Director of the Animal Law & Policy Program and Director of the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World . Prior to coming to HLS, Stilt was Harry R. Horrow Professor in International Law at Northwestern Law School and Professor of History at Northwestern University. Stilt’s research focuses on Islamic law and society in both historical and contemporary contexts.

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The Department of Government at Harvard is a world leader in the study of political science, and the department’s faculty covers a wide range of fields and methodologies. The department’s breadth and depth allows you to pursue groundbreaking research on a variety of topics. The doctoral program’s diversity and flexibility enables scholars from all backgrounds and interests to thrive.

In the Department of Government, you will study and do research with the faculty of the department and leading scholars in other Harvard departments and schools, including Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. You have access to unparalleled resources, ranging from the largest university library in the world to the Harvard research computing cluster to a wide array of centers and institutes associated with the department.

Graduates of the department write dissertations on topics ranging from ancient political theory to the politics of cybersecurity. They go on to jobs at leading academic institutions, companies, government agencies, and nonprofits.

Additional information on the graduate program is available from the Department of Government and requirements for the degree are detailed in Policies . 

Areas of Study

American Government | Comparative Politics | International Relations | Political Thought and Its History | Quantitative Methods/Formal Theory

Admissions Requirements

Please review the admissions requirements and other information before applying. You can find degree program-specific admissions requirements below and access additional guidance on applying from the Department of Government .

Writing Sample

A writing sample is required as part of the application and should be a recent scholarly or critical paper, 15 to 25 pages in length.

For the coordinated JD/PhD  in law and political science, applicants must apply separately to each program and indicate in the application to the PhD program that a concurrent application has been submitted to the Harvard Law School.

Personal Statement

Standardized tests.

GRE General: Required Writing Sample: Required (15-25 pages) iBT TOEFL preferred minimum score: 105 IELTS preferred minimum score: 7.5

Theses & Dissertations

Theses & Dissertations for Government

See list of Government faculty

APPLICATION DEADLINE

Questions about the program.

How a PhD in Sydney can take researchers to Harvard Law School

Ravi Prakash Vyas

Ravi Prakash Vyas, a PhD researcher at Sydney Law School, will be heading to Harvard for six months in August to complete his studies.

This unique opportunity stems from his pursuit of a PhD at Sydney Law School, which not only opens many different career pathways but also allows him to participate in the prestigious partnership with Harvard Law School.

Ravi's journey began with his decision to pursue his PhD at Sydney Law School.

“I chose Sydney Law School to pursue my PhD in International Law as it is one of the top-ranked law schools with leading academics in the world," he says.

“With Professor Ben Saul, Jeanne Huang, and Emily Crawford as my supervisory team, I could not have found a better place to pursue my research.”

When asked about the benefits of completing a PhD program at Sydney Law School, Yane Svetiev, the Associate Dean (Research Education), says,

“The PhD at Sydney Law School is a long-standing advanced research degree, which opens up many different career pathways. We have trained not only many academics in Australia and internationally but also practitioners working in legal practice and in national and international institutions, as well as judges. It has the added advantage of a rich network of alumni around the world.”

The HDR Partnership with Harvard

The HDR partnership allows one Sydney Law School PhD candidate per year to spend a semester at Harvard Law School during their doctoral degree.

This opportunity enables candidates to discuss and expose their research, test ideas before finalising their thesis, audit classes, attend seminars, and learn from other researchers. This structured exchange provides invaluable immersion in another institution, enhancing the doctoral experience.

Ravi explains that the application process involves two stages.

“First, HDR students must submit a statement of purpose detailing their research project, reasons for applying, the planned activities at Harvard Law, and how this experience will benefit their research and support timely degree completion,” he said.

“Additionally, they need a support letter from their supervisors endorsing the application. If selected by Sydney Law School, the student then applies to Harvard Law School, which is very competitive and accepts only one candidate per year from Sydney Law School.”

Ravi’s journey to Harvard

Ravi's research focuses on the convergence and divergence in China’s and India’s approaches to governing international peace and security and their impact on the future of international law, and therefore he is very excited about the opportunity to study at Harvard.

“An exchange at Harvard is an excellent opportunity for me, as it will provide me with new insights and fresh perspectives in my research area, exposing me to leading scholars and contemporary debates. It will also enable me to utilise one of the best libraries in the world for my research,” Ravi shares.

He plans to write his final chapters at Harvard, focusing on regional security and benefiting from Harvard's academic environment.

Advice for Researchers

Ravi strongly encourages future and current research scholars at Sydney Law School to take up this unique opportunity to undertake the HDR program at Harvard Law School.

“Discuss your plans with your supervisors early to decide the optimal timing for the exchange. Ensure your applications clearly demonstrate how your research aligns with Harvard's strengths and how you can both contribute to and benefit from the exchange,” he advises.

Additionally, he recommends applying for the Walter Reid Scholarship, which offers substantial support for research overseas, significantly facilitating the exchange experience.

“The support from the Walter Reid Scholarship at Sydney Law School has been instrumental. My time away will give me a break from my teaching and administrative commitments, which will be highly beneficial for my PhD progress and timely completion” he shares.

Professor Simon Bronitt, Ravi Prakash Vyas, and Justice Chrissa Loukas-Karisson

Expanding Opportunities

While the structured Harvard HDR exchange is unique, Sydney Law School encourages PhD candidates to seek opportunities to spend time at other institutions, either in Australia or internationally.

The Sydney Law School provides scholarships and funding to enable these experiences for researchers. Yane Svetiev expresses that the law school is actively seeking to join the University’s joint PhD programs with other international universities, such as Glasgow and Copenhagen, to further enhance exchange opportunities for their PhD candidates.

Ravi's journey from Sydney Law School to Harvard Law School is just one example of the opportunities available to researchers who choose to complete their PhDs at the Sydney Law School.

Explore the partnership

Walter reid scholarship, related articles, sydney law school alumnus awarded justice peter hely scholarship, sydney law alum concludes oxford bcl with prestigious scholarship, a look back in time: the law school comfort fund.

HLS Dissertations, Theses, and JD Papers

S.j.d. dissertations, ll.m. papers, ll.m. theses, j.d. papers, submitting your paper to an online collection, other sources for student papers beyond harvard, getting help, introduction.

This is a guide to finding Harvard Law School (“HLS”) student-authored works held by the Library and in online collections. This guide covers HLS S.J.D Dissertations, LL.M. papers, J.D. third-year papers, seminar papers, and prize papers.

There have been changes in the HLS degree requirements for written work. The library’s collection practices and catalog descriptions for these works has varied. Please note that there are gaps in the library’s collection and for J.D. papers, few of these works are being collected any longer.

If we have an S.J.D. dissertation or LL.M. thesis, we have two copies. One is kept in the general collection and one in the Red Set, an archival collection of works authored by HLS affiliates. If we have a J.D. paper, we have only one copy, kept in the Red Set. Red Set copies are last resort copies available only by advance appointment in Historical and Special Collections .

Some papers have not been processed by library staff. If HOLLIS indicates a paper is “ordered-received” please use this form to have library processing completed.

The HLS Doctor of Juridical Science (“S.J.D.”) program began in 1910.  The library collection of these works is not comprehensive. Exceptions are usually due to scholars’ requests to withhold Library deposit. 

• HLS S.J.D. Dissertations in HOLLIS To refine these search results by topic or faculty advisor, or limit by date, click Add a New Line.
• Hein’s Legal Theses and Dissertations Microfiche Mic K556.H45x Drawers 947-949 This microfiche set includes legal theses and dissertations from HLS and other premier law schools. It currently includes about 300 HLS dissertations and theses.
• Hein's Legal Theses and Dissertations Contents List This content list is in order by school only, not by date, subject or author. It references microfiche numbers within the set housed in the Microforms room on the entry level of the library, drawers 947-949. The fiche are a different color for each institution.
• ProQuest Dissertations and Theses @ Harvard University (Harvard login) Copy this search syntax: dg(S.J.D.) You will find about 130 SJD Dissertations dated from 1972 to 2004. They are not available in full text.
• DASH Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard Sponsored by Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication, DASH is an open repository for research papers by members of the Harvard community. There are currently about 600 HLS student papers included. Unfortunately it is not possible to search by type of paper or degree awarded.

The Master of Laws (“LL.M.”) degree has been awarded since 1923. Originally, the degree required completion of a major research paper, akin to a thesis. Since 1993, most students have the option of writing the LL.M. "short paper."  This is a 25-page (or longer) paper advised by a faculty supervisor or completed in conjunction with a seminar.  Fewer LL.M. candidates continue to write the more extensive "long-paper." LL.M. candidates holding J.D.s from the U.S. must write the long paper.

• HLS Written Work Requirements for LL.M. Degree The current explanation of the LL.M. written work requirement for the master of laws.

The library generally holds HLS LL.M. long papers and short papers. In recent years, we require author release in order to do so. In HOLLIS, no distinction is made between types of written work created in satisfaction of the LL.M. degree; all are described as LL.M. thesis. Though we describe them as thesis, the law school refers to them solely as papers or in earlier years, essays. HOLLIS records indicate the number of pages, so at the record level, it is possible to distinguish long papers.

• HLS LL.M. Papers in HOLLIS To refine these search results by topic, faculty advisor, seminar or date, click Add a New Line.

HLS LL.M. Papers are sometimes available in DASH and Hein's Legal Dissertations and Theses. See descriptions above .

The HLS J.D. written work requirement has changed over time. The degree formerly required a substantial research paper comparable in scope to a law review article written under faculty supervision, the "third year paper." Since 2008, J.D. students have the option of using two shorter works instead.

Of all those written, the library holds relatively few third-year papers. They were not actively collected but accepted by submission from faculty advisors who deemed a paper worthy of institutional retention. The papers are described in HOLLIS as third year papers, seminar papers, and student papers. Sometimes this distinction was valid, but not always. The faculty deposit tradition more or less ended in 2006, though the possibility of deposit still exists. 

• J.D. Written Work Requirement
• Faculty Deposit of Student Papers with the Library

HLS Third Year Papers in HOLLIS

To refine these search results by topic, faculty advisor, seminar or date, click Add a New Line.

• HLS Student Papers Some third-year papers and LL.M. papers were described in HOLLIS simply as student papers. To refine these search results, click "Add a New Line" and add topic, faculty advisor, or course title.
• HLS Seminar Papers Note that these include legal research pathfinders produced for the Advanced Legal Research course when taught by Virginia Wise.

Prize Papers

HLS has many endowed prizes for student papers and essays. There are currently 16 different writing prizes. See this complete descriptive list with links to lists of winners from 2009 to present. Note that there is not always a winner each year for each award. Prize winners are announced each year in the commencement pamphlet.

The Library has not specifically collected prize papers over the years but has added copies when possible. The HOLLIS record for the paper will usually indicate its status as a prize paper. The most recent prize paper was added to the collection in 2006.

Addison Brown Prize Animal Law & Policy Program Writing Prize Victor Brudney Prize Davis Polk Legal Profession Paper Prize Roger Fisher and Frank E.A. Sander Prize Yong K. Kim ’95 Memorial Prize Islamic Legal Studies Program Prize on Islamic Law Laylin Prize LGBTQ Writing Prize Mancini Prize Irving Oberman Memorial Awards John M. Olin Prize in Law and Economics Project on the Foundations of Private Law Prize Sidney I. Roberts Prize Fund Klemens von Klemperer Prize Stephen L. Werner Prize

• Harvard Law School Prize Essays (1850-1868) A historical collection of handwritten prize essays covering the range of topics covered at that time. See this finding aid for a collection description.

The following information about online repositories is not a recommendation or endorsement to participate.

• ProQuest Dissertations and Theses HLS is not an institutional participant to this collection. If you are interested in submitting your work, refer to these instructions and note that there is a fee required, which varies depending on the format of submission.
• EBSCO Open Dissertations Relatively new, this is an open repository of metadata for dissertations. It is an outgrowth of the index American Doctoral Dissertations. The aim is to cover 1933 to present and, for modern works, to link to full text available in institutional repositories. Harvard is not one of the institutional participants.
• DASH Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard

Sponsored by Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication, this is an open repository for research papers by members of the Harvard community. See more information about the project. 

Some HLS students have submitted their degree paper to DASH.  If you would like to submit your paper, you may use this authorization form  or contact June Casey , Librarian for Open Access Initiatives and Scholarly Communication at Harvard Law School.

• ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (Harvard Login) Covers dissertations and masters' theses from North American graduate schools and many worldwide. Provides full text for many since the 1990s and has descriptive data for older works.
• NDLTD Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Union Catalog Worldwide in scope, NDLTD contains millions of records of electronic theses and dissertations from the early 1900s to the present.
• Law Commons of the Digital Commons Network The Law Commons has dissertations and theses, as well as many other types of scholarly research such as book chapters and conference proceedings. They aim to collect free, full-text scholarly work from hundreds of academic institutions worldwide.
• EBSCO Open Dissertations Doctoral dissertations from many institutions. Free, open repository.
• Dissertations from Center for Research Libraries Dissertations found in this resource are available to the Harvard University Community through Interlibrary Loan.
• British Library EThOS Dissertation source from the British Library listing doctoral theses awarded in the UK. Some available for immediate download and some others may be requested for scanning.
• BASE from Bielefeld University Library Index of the open repositoris of most academic institutions. Includes many types of documents including doctoral and masters theses.

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• Last Updated: Sep 12, 2023 10:46 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/studentpapers

Harvard University Digital Accessibility Policy

Program in Islamic Law

Research Fellows & Editors

Mohammed Allehbi 

Pil-lc research fellow, 2023-2024.

Mohammed Allehbi is the PIL-LC Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School and the Library of Congress for the 2023–2024 academic year. He specializes in law and governance in the Islamic Near East and the Mediterranean during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. After earning his master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Chicago in 2014, he received his doctorate in history from Vanderbilt University in 2021, where he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies. His first article, “It is Permitted for the Amīr but not the Qāḍī’: The Military-Administrative Genealogy of Coercion in Abbasid Criminal Justice,” was published in  Islamic Law and Society  in the fall of 2022. It explores the emergence and rationalization of coercive interrogations in late antique and early medieval Islamic criminal justice. Currently, he is working on his first monograph about the formation of Islamic criminal justice and policing in the Near East and the Mediterranean between the eighth and twelfth centuries.  

Fatma Gül Karagöz

Research fellow, 2023-2024.

Fatma Gül Karagöz is an assistant professor of legal history based at Galatasaray University Faculty of Law. Since working on her MA thesis on the codes of the early modern Ottoman Empire and particularly on the New Code (Kanunname-i Cedid), a compilation of fatwas and codifications on land ownership, Fatma has been interested in land law in the Ottoman Empire. Her works are mostly focused on the property relations on agricultural land and the land usufruct in legal theory and practice. Her current research is based on the application of property law (land law) in the second half of 18th-century Antioch by focusing specifically on the exercise of property rights by women. She received her Ph.D. in Public Law from İstanbul University (2018), MA in Ottoman History from İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University (2010), and BA in Law from Galatarasay University Faculty of Law (2005). 

Bahman Khodadadi

Pil-lc research fellow, 2024-2025.

Dr. Bahman Khodadadi is the the PIL-LC Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School and the Library of Congress for the 2024–2025 academic year. He specializes in Islamic law and Middle Eastern Studies, with a particular focus on Shiite Islamic jurisprudence and his current research interests span Iranian studies, sociology of law, Islamic law history, criminal law theory, and the politico-juridical dynamics within Islamic jurisprudence, particularly within the Shi'a tradition. He completed his PhD on “On Theocratic Criminal Law” at the University of Münster, Germany, in 2021, graduating with the highest distinction (summa cum laude). His forthcoming monograph will be published soon by Oxford University Press. Khodadadi’s academic achievements have garnered recognition, including the prestigious “Harry Westermann Award” for the best doctoral dissertation at the University of Münster, along with two DAAD awards in 2016 and 2023. He served as a research associate at the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School from 2023 to 2024. From 2015 to 2023, he was actively involved as a member of the Excellence Cluster: Religion and Politics in Germany, collaborating on various projects. He is an author and lecturer, with numerous publications and translated articles, as well as lecture engagements across several European countries, including Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Ireland.

Mariam Sheibani

Research editor, 2020-present.

Mariam Sheibani  is Assistant Professor in History at the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at The University of Toronto Scarborough. In 2018, she received her PhD in Islamic Thought from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Before joining the University of Toronto, she was a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School and Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School.

Her research interests are in late antique and medieval Islamic intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on the theory and practice of Islamic law and Islamic ethical traditions. Her first book project,  Islamic Legal Philosophy: Ibn  ʿ Abd al-Salām and the Ethical Turn in Medieval Islamic Law,  examines how Muslim jurists from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries addressed salient questions of legal philosophy and ethics, leading them to develop competing legal methodologies and visions of the law. The study centers on a prominent Damascene heir of Khorasani Shāfiʿism, ʿIzz al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Salām, a pivotal figure in the development of Islamic legal philosophy, ethics, and legal maxims ( qawā ʿ id fiqhiyya). 

Her other ongoing research projects investigate the construction of late antique Islamic law, judicial practice in medieval Mamluk Cairo, and classical doctrines of Muslim family law. She continues to serve as Lead Blog Editor for the  Islamic Law Blog  based at Harvard Law School. Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned a BA in Public Affairs and Policy Management, an MA in Legal Studies, and a second an MA in Islamic Thought. She has conducted research in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, the UK, and West Africa.

For more information on her scholarship and research, please visit  https://www.mariamsheibani.com/ .

Omar Abdel-Ghaffar

Research assistant, 2020-present.

Omar Abdel-Ghaffar is a JD-PhD student at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and History Department. His research interests are in late medieval Islamic legal and social history, with a particular interest in courts and conceptions of justice. Before coming to Harvard, he completed his MA at Columbia University and his BA at UCDavis. 

Research Assistant, 2024-Present

Jinge Cao is a Master of Theological Studies candidate focusing on Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School.

Past Students and Fellows

Sohaira Siddiqui

Research fellow, 2017.

Sohaira Siddiqui was a Policy Fellow for the Spring 2017 semester. She is currently Assistant Professor of Theology and Islamic Studies at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar. 

Her work focuses on the relationship between law, theology and political thought in classical Islam; Islamic law during British colonization; Islamic law in contemporary Muslim societies; and secularism and modernity in relation to Muslims in the West.

Most recently, she is the author of Law and Politics Under the 'Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni  (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and  Locating the Shari'a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice  (Brill, 2019). She has also published numerous articles in  Islamic Law and Society, Journal of Islamic Studies, Journal of the American Oriental Society,  and  Middle East Law and Governance.  She serves as one of the series editors for Mohr Siebeck's  Sapientia Islamica: Studies in Islamic Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism.

She received her doctorate in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014.

Mubasher Hussain

Fulbright scholar, 2016-2017.

Professor Mubasher Hussain comes to SHARIAsource as a Fulbright Scholar for the 2016-2017 academic year. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Islamic Law and head of the Hadith and Sirah Department at the International Islamic University, Pakistan. Hussain also serves as the Secretary of the National Sirah Centre at the International Islamic University, Islamabad.

His current research project engages the neglected life and legacy of Shah Waliullah and his impact on traditional Islamic thought and Islamic law. More information on Professor Hussain’s research .

Hussain has a B.A, M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of the Punjab, Pakistan

Ahmed El Shamsy

Senior fellow, 2017-2018.

Ahmed El Shamsy is a Senior Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law. He is also an Associate Professor of Islamic thought at the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such
 as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.

His first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History , traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. He is now at work
on his second book, a study of the reinvention of the Islamic scholarly tradition and its textual canon via the printing press in the early twentieth century.

El Shamsy has a PhD from Harvard University.

Ebrahim Afsah

Policy fellow, 2017-2018.

Ebrahim Afsah is Policy Fellow at the Program in Islamic law. He is an Associate Professor of international law at the University of Copenhagen, where he teaches international, European Union, constitutional and Islamic law. Before joining the faculty in Copenhagen, he worked for a decade as a management consultant in the Middle East and Central Asia, primarily on administrative and legal reform, counter-narcotics, prisons and legal training.

His areas of interest are public international law, especially the law of armed conflict; public law, especially administrative and constitutional law in post-conflict settings; and Islamic law, again especially its (underdeveloped) public law. Ebrahim has been a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, a senior fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo.

He has been trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Trinity College Dublin, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg.

Mansurah Izzul Mohamed

Visiting fellow, shariasource, 2017-2018.

Mansurah Izzul Mohamed was a Visiting Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law between 2017-2018. Her role will be to translate relevant documents in Malay and advise on relevant and important sources to be introduced and digitized. She will be in residence at ILSP during the 2017-2018 academic year.

Her research interests include Southeast Asian studies that address the political aspects, as well as the socio-economic implications of Shariah introduction and subsequent legal implementation in a country. Mohamed is also interested in areas where human rights and the different cultural understandings intersect; as well as the use of negotiation studies to further understand crisis management situations, and she has explored these in her Masters and Bachelors dissertations.

Mohamed holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) from the Fletcher School, Tufts University (2017) and a Master of Arts in Political Studies from Auckland University (2011), respectively and a Single Honors Bachelor Degree in International Relations from Keele University (2006). 

Rodrigo Adem

Research fellow, 2017-2018.

Rodrigo Adem Alvarez was a Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law between 2017-2018. He studies pre-modern Muslim thought as an intellectual and social historian.  He is particularly interested in how scholarly networks mediated social and epistemic authority within the urban and political development of the Near East and Mediterranean over the 8th to 14th century.  He hopes to further current understanding of how paradigmatic scholarly traditions of law, theology, historiography, philosophy, mysticism, and political thought came to be codified during this period, and persist in key facets of Muslim thought to the present day.

Adem has an MA and PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago and a BA in History and German Literature from the University of Wisconson, Madison.

Sheza Alqera

Research assistant, 2019-2020.

Sheza Alqera is a PhD Candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Iman Mohamed

Research assistant, 2019.

Iman Mohamed is a JD Candidate at Harvard Law School and PhD Candidate in History at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 

Ari Schriber

Research assistant, 2016-2019.

Ari Schriber is a PhD Candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Aaron Spevack

Research fellow, 2018-2019.

Aaron Spevack was a Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law between 2018-2019. He specializes in Islamic Intellectual History, with an emphasis on 13th-19th-century law, theology, and Sufism.

He has published two books and a number of articles on Islamic intellectual history. His book The Archetypal Sunni Scholar: Law, Theology, and Mysticism in the Synthesis of al-Bajuri was published by SUNY Press in 2014; through a study of various commentaries written by the 19th-century Egyptian scholar Ibrahim al-Bajuri, he challenges popular theories of intellectual decline and anti-rationalism. One of his more recent works focuses on the coalescence of Northwest African and Persian theological and philosophical thought in 13th-19th century Islamic education, especially its reception in Egypt's al-Azhar University.

He obtained a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Intellectual History from Boston University and an ALB from Harvard University’s Extension Division. He also studied Jazz performance and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music and has extensive experience performing Jazz, Hip-hop, and Sufi music from Morocco, Turkey, and the Levant.  

Deyaa Alrwishdi

Research assistant, fall 2021.

Deyaa Alrwishdi is a Syrian lawyer and adjunct professor of law at American University Washington College of Law (WCL). He has a decade of project management and legal development experience. Prior to the Syrian conflict, Alrwishdi served as the legal deputy at the Syrian Construction and Establishment Institute, where he provided leadership and direction for staff and ensured compliance with the institution’s policies. Following the Syrian uprising, Alrwishdi worked at the national and international levels to defend victims of human rights violations in Syria, including directly defending activists arrested at protests and documenting atrocities across Syria. Mr. Alrwishdi founded the Free Syrian Lawyers Association and the Center for Rule of Law and Good Governance with the goal of amplifying the voices of Syrian civil society and working towards the transition to justice in post-conflict situations. He received the U.S. Department of State Leader for Democracy Fellowship, the Rubin International Human Rights Award from Stanford Law School, and the Alumni Fund Scholarship from WCL. Alrwishdi holds an LL.B. from Damascus University, an LL.M. from WCL, and an M.P.A. from the AU School of Public Affairs.

Israa Alzamli

Research assistant, 2021-2022.

Israa Alzamli is a JD candidate at Harvard Law School.

Samiha Baseer

Research assistant, 2022.

Samiha  Baseer is a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. At HDS, her main area of focus is Islamic studies. She is broadly interested in Islamic law and the history of Islam across South Asia. Prior to HDS,  Samiha  received a BA at the University of California Berkeley.

Anissa Abdel-Jelil

Anissa Abdel-Jelil is an MDiv Candidate at Harvard Divinity School.

Research Assistant, Summer 2020

Aaron Dunn is a rising 3L at Harvard Law School.

Jason Golfinos

Research assistant, 2020-2021.

Jason Golfinos is a JD student at Harvard Law School.

Stephanie Gullo

Stephanie Gullo is a rising 2L at Harvard Law School.

Daniel Jacobs

Daniel Jacobs is a PhD Candidate in History at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Tiran Bajgiran

Research assistant, 2022-2023.

Tiran Bajgiran is an SJD candidate and Knox Fellow at Harvard Law School

Saaleh Baseer

Research assistant, 2023.

Saaleh is PhD candidate in the History-CMES joint program and interested in postclassical Ḥanafi legal theory, Mughal political theology, and the development of Ḥanafi substantive law in Mughal India.

He earned his BA at Columbia University, in History. He has also completed a six-year Dars-i Nizami course in South Africa and has spent three years training as a Mufti at Darul Qasim College, writing over two-hundred fatwas in Hanafi doctrine.

Marzieh Tofighi Darian

Program student fellow, 2018-2022.

Marzieh Tofighi Darian is an SJD Candidate at Harvard Law School.

Research Assistant, Spring 2024

Worthy is a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. She received her B.A. in Economics from Carleton College. Her areas of interests include comparative law, criminal procedure, and data analytics. 

Majid Dohan

Research assistant, 2023-2024.

Majid Dohan is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Masooma Haider

Masooma Haider is a 2L at Harvard Law School. As a second-generation Pakistani-American, Masooma is interested in issues of Muslim civil rights, immigration reform, data privacy, and civic engagement, as well as the study and documentation of Shi'i jurisprudence.

Reema Doleh

Reema Doleh is a J.D. Candidate at Harvard Law School. She received her B.B.A from Baruch College in Finance. 

Saleh Ismail

Saleh Ismail is a J.D. Candidate at Harvard Law School.

Ariq Hatibie

Research assistant, 2021-2023.

Ariq Hatibie is a 1L at Harvard Law School interested in human rights and international law. He has worked for the European Commission on investor-state arbitration issues, collaborated with the International Crisis Group on a transitional justice project for the Yazidis of Northern Iraq, and conducted research in the fields of public health, nuclear diplomacy, and peacebuilding. At Harvard, he is an articles editor for the Human Rights Journal, and is part of the Advocates for Human Rights.

Ariq holds a BA in Global Affairs from Yale University and an MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford.

Shanzay Javaid

Shanzay Javaid is an LL.M. candidate at Harvard Law School. Her areas of focus include issues in cyberlaw and regulation of tech space, as well as commercial and contract law. She is also interested in research of Islamic law and the digitization of its sources to provide accessibility world-wide. Before coming to Harvard, she worked as a transactional lawyer and served as a legal advisor for a UK-based tech company in Pakistan

Abdelrahman Mahmoud

Research assistant, 2020-2023.

Abdelrahman Mahmoud is a PhD Candidate in the History and Middle East Studies program at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Lily Moens is a JD candidate at Harvard Law School.

Abdul Wahab Niaz

Abdul Wahab Niaz is an LL.M Candidate at Harvard Law School. Prior to attending HLS, he worked as a law clerk to Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial at the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and also rendered services in the dispute resolution and corporate advisory team of a leading Pakistani law firm. His research interests in Islamic law center around studying judicial islamization of laws in Pakistan and exploring Islamic constitutionalism in muslim-majority countries. At PIL, he is interested in working on digitization of Islamic law resources and also exploring the intersection between law and technology in our digitized world.

Niaz holds BA.-LL.B (Honours) from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

Sohaib Baig

Research fellow, 2020–2021.

Sohaib Baig was a Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law between 2020-2021. He is interested broadly in connected intellectual and social histories of Islam across South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Middle East in the early modern and modern period.

Sohaib's book project is based on his dissertation, entitled "Indian Hanafis in an Ocean of Hadith: Islamic Legal Authority between South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, 16th - 20th Centuries." It examines how Indian Hanafis from Sindh and Delhi maneuvered across imperial geographies to pursue hadith scholarship and engage multiple legal schools (madhhabs) in the Indian Ocean. It analyzes how such transregional exchanges produced immense debate on the authority of the Islamic legal school and the usage of hadith as legal evidence, leading to the formation of new Islamic legal institutions in the modern period.

He completed his PhD in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sohaib has conducted archival research in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Netherlands, and the UK.

Research Fellow, 2019–2020

Dana Lee is a research fellow at the Program in Islamic Law for the 2019-2020 academic year. She is currently working on her first book project based on her dissertation entitled,  At the Limits of Law: Necessity in Islamic Legal History, Second/Eighth through Tenth/Sixteenth Centuries .  

She received her Ph.D. from the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton University in 2019 and previously received a J.D. from UCLA School of Law.

Research Fellow, 2018–2020

Mariam Sheibani is a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School's Program in Islamic Law and Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School.   Her research interests are in Islamic intellectual and social history, with a focus on law, ethics, gender, and contemporary Islamic thought. She serves as Lead Blog Editor for the  Islamic Law Blog  (formerly the SHARIAsourceBLOG) based at Harvard Law School.

Her first book project, Islamic Legal Philosophy: Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and the Ethical Turn in Medieval Islamic Law , examines how Muslim jurists from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries addressed salient questions of legal philosophy and ethics, leading them to develop competing legal methodologies and visions of the law. In particular, she traces the development of a purposive, analytical, and socially responsive legal discourse that originated among Shāfiʿī jurists in Khorasan and continued to evolve in Ayyubid Damascus and Mamluk Cairo in subsequent centuries. The study centers on a prominent Damascene heir of Khorasani Shāfiʿism, ʿIzz al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Salām, a pivotal figure in the development of Islamic legal philosophy, ethics, and legal maxims (qawāʿid fiqhiyya). Learn more about her book project and other current  research projects .

She received her PhD in Islamic Thought from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned a BA in Public Affairs and Policy Management, an MA in Legal Studies, and a second an MA in Islamic Thought. 

R. Salah Muhiddin

Research assistant, spring 2022.

Salah Muhiddin is a JD candidate at Harvard Law School.

Asma Khoshmehr

Asma Khoshmehr is a MFA student at Emerson College.

Salaam Sbini

Salaam Sbini is an MTS student at Harvard Divinity School. 

Hani Ramadan

Hani Ramadan is a PhD candidate in Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies, in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC), Harvard. His main focus is on Quranic Studies and Sufism. His MA dissertation (American University of Beirut) focused on the methodology of the Sufi interpretation of the Quran.

Faris Rehman

Faris Rehman is a 1L at Harvard Law School hoping to concentrate in the intersection between law and technology. He has his B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University, where he specialized in artificial intelligence.

Marta Canneri

Research assistant, 2020.

Marta Canneri is a JD student at Harvard Law School.

Aiyanna Sanders

Research assistant, 2020-2022.

Aiyanna Sanders is a JD student at Harvard Law School.

Rehan Staton

Rehan Staton is a JD student at Harvard Law School.

Hassaan Shahawy

Shariasource student editor, 2020.

Hassaan Shahawy is a student at Harvard Law School. At HLS, he was elected the first Muslim president of the  Harvard Law Review , and also served as the co-president of the Muslim Law Students Association and as a Lead Article Editor with the  Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review . He is interested in legal history, criminal law, environmental law, and property. He also has studied Islamic law traditionally in various countries around the world.

Prior to HLS, he received a BA in History and Near Eastern Studies at Harvard University, then an MA and PhD in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.  

Rimsha Saeed

Rimsha Saeed is a 1L at Harvard Law School. She received her bachelors in Public Affairs from UCLA and is interested in property and family law, as well as legal issues arising at the intersection of American and Islamic law.

Saqib Qureshi

Saqib Qureshi is an MTS Candidate at Harvard Divinity School.

Zahra Takhshid

Research affiliate, 2020-2021.

Zahra Takhshid was a Research Affiliate to the Program in Islamic Law and the Reginald Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching at Harvard Law School. She also served as the Islamic Law Fellow at the Institute on Religion, Law, & Lawyer’s Work at Fordham Law School. Zahra is a  Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University  and has been selected as the 2021 Quantum Fellow at the Center for Quantum Networks of University of Arizona in partnership with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP).

She teaches and writes about torts, contracts, privacy, social media, technology and the law. Part of her scholarship explores how to use tools from torts and contracts in resolving challenges with emerging technological developments. A second strand of her interest is Islamic and comparative law. 

Zahra holds a doctorate (S.J.D.) from Fordham Law School. She earned an LL.M. from the George Washington University Law School where she was the recipient of full tuition Thomas Buergenthal Scholarship. She also has an LL.M. ( Summa Cum Laude ) and an LL.B. ( Magna Cum Laude ) from University of Tehran School of Law and Political Science.

Rabiat Akande

Research affiliate, 2019-2021.

Rabiat Akande was a Research Affiliate at the Program in Islamic Law between 2019-2020 and a Clark Byse Fellow at Harvard Law School. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Law at Osgoode University. 

Her current research explores struggles over religion-state relations in comparative contexts and illuminates law’s centrality to one of modernity’s most contested issues–the relationship between religion, and the state, and society–while also interrogating law’s complex relationship with power, political theology, identity, and socio-political change. These issues are at the forefront of her book project, Constitutional Entanglements: Empire, Law and Religion in Colonial Northern Nigeria (under contract with Cambridge University Press), which traces the emergence of “secularism” as a constitutional idea of ordering religion-state relations in early to mid-twentieth century British Colonial Northern Nigeria, and grapples with the postcolonial legacy of that inheritance.

She received her SJD from Harvard Law School in 2019 and obtained her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ibadan, graduating with a First Class Honors and at the top of her class and later studied at the Nigerian Law School from which she also graduated with a First Class Honors.

Mary Elston

Mary Elston is a scholar of Islam focusing on the modern and contemporary Middle East. Her research interests are in the anthropology of Islam, religious studies, and Islamic intellectual history, with a focus on education, knowledge, politics, and language.  

Her dissertation, “Reviving  Turāth : Islamic Education in Modern Egypt,” combines ethnography and textual analysis to examine the politics, texts, and practices of a traditionalist education movement at Egypt’s al-Azhar, the preeminent institution of Islamic learning located in Cairo, received the Alwaleed Bin Talal Prize for Best dissertation in Islamic Studies in 2020.  

Her research in Egypt was supported by the Loeb Dissertation Research Fellowship in Religious Studies, the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Harvard University Center for African Studies. At PLS, Mary plans to turn her dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively titled “Constructing Tradition: Islamic  Turāth  in the Contemporary Islamic World.” Her book will take a social scientific and humanistic approach to debates about tradition, knowledge, and Islamic education in the modern and contemporary Muslim world.

 In May 2020, Mary received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

email:  [email protected]

Karina Halevy

Research assistant, summer 2021.

Karina Halevy is an undergraduate student majoring in Applied Math and Computer Science. She's interested in computational linguistics, data science for social good, education, and tech ethics.

Mohammad Abderrazzaq

Research affiliate, 2020-2022.

Mohammad A. Abderrazzaq is a Research Affiliate at the Program in Islamic Law. He has also been a contributing editor for the Sharia Source Project at Harvard Law School. In addition to his research in Islamic legal theory, Mohammad has taught courses on Islam in America, Islamic intellectual history, Islamic law, Islamic history, and Qur’anic exegesis.

His dissertation was a study of the development of  maqāṣid  juridical theory, which he is preparing for publication under the title  The Higher Objectives of Islamic Law: The Development of Maqāṣid Theory from al-Shāṭibī to Ibn ʿĀshūr and the Contemporary Maqāṣid Movement . Mohammad is also an editor for a book series treating the  maqāṣid  thought of premodern and modern legal figures.

He received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  

Research Affiliate 2022-2024

Faiz Ahmed (PhD, UC Berkeley; JD, UC College of Law, San Francisco) is currently Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Brown University. Ahmed’s primary specializations are the late Ottoman Empire, Afghanistan, and the British Empire, as well as diasporic communities tied to the region we today call the Middle East. His core research and teaching engage questions of human mobility, travel, and migration; social histories of Islamic law and learning; and the intersections of constitutionalism, citizenship, and diplomacy.

Ahmed’s first book,  Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires   (Harvard University Press), was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in 2018. His current research explores historical ties and engagements of the Ottoman Empire in the Americas, with a focus on social, economic, and legal connections to the United States and Canada during the long nineteenth century. His published articles have appeared in journals of law, history, and Middle East Studies, including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East ; Global Jurist ; International History Review ; International Journal of Middle East Studies ; Iranian Studies ; Jadaliyya ; Osmanlı Araştırmaları ( Journal of Ottoman Studies) ; Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association ; and Perspectives on History. Dr. Ahmed is also co-organizer with Brown University colleagues Michael Vorenberg, Emily Owens, and Rebecca Nedostup of the  Brown Legal History Workshop and the Brown Legal Studies collaborative.

Yusuf Celik

Data science fellow, 2021-2022.

Yusuf Celik is the lead data scientist for the SHARIAsource Courts and Canons Project, 2020-2021. He  is currently an adjunct lecturer and researcher at the University of Utrecht.

His research is on Philosophical Hermeneutics in the Islamic tradition and Continental philosophy. Yusuf Celik has also been active for years in the field of software engineering. As an independent contractor he has worked for different high profile clients in the capacity of lead developer, consultant, code coach, and Scrum master. He is currently exploring ways to synthesize insights from Philosophical Hermeneutics with new technologies such as Deep Learning.

Celik received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2020 for his dissertation on contemporary Qur’an hermeneutics in Turkey.

MESA Global Academy Fellow, 2020-2022

Dr. Issam Eido is a Global Academy Scholar in partnership with the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). He is also an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University Department of Religious Studies. A former visiting scholar of Islamic and Arabic Studies at The University of Chicago-Divinity School (2013-2015). Prior to the Syrian uprising, Eido served as a lecturer in the faculty of Islamic Studies in the Department of Quran and Hadith Studies at the University of Damascus.  

Eido's research focuses on the Qur'an, Hadith Studies, Sufism. His teaching interests focus on Qur’an, Hadith, Early Islamic legal theory, and Arabic Studies.  

Eido received his Ph.D. from the Department of Quran and Hadith Studies at Damascus University in 2010. For more information visit his webpage . 

Hedayat Heikal

Research fellow, 2021-2022.

Hedayat Heikal is a Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law and a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She served as a Research Scholar in Law and the inaugural Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo, as well as a Graduate Program Fellow at Harvard Law School. Her academic work focuses on comparative constitutional law, the rise of the administrative state, and Middle Eastern and Islamic law. Between 2009 and 2013, she practiced as a litigation, arbitration, and enforcement attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in New York, representing clients on a wide array of disputes and regulatory matters.

She recently completed a  dissertation titled “Beyond Juristocracy: The Rise and Fall of Judicial Activism on National Identity Questions in the Middle East.”

Hedayat also holds a Doctor of Law (J.D.) magna cum laude  from Harvard Law School and a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.)  summa cum laude from the American University in Cairo. 

Shahrad Shahvand

Shahrad Shahvand is a PhD Candidate in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations program at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Cem Tecimer

Research assistant, 2016-2024.

Cem Tecimer is an SJD Candidate at Harvard Law School.

Fatima Essop

Research affiliate, 2022-2023.

Fatima Essop is a Fellow at the Program on Law & Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School and an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa. She has practiced in the areas of public interest litigation, administrative law, environmental law, torts, and family law, and is an accredited family law mediator with experience in the area of Muslim family law. 

Her current research focuses on the practice of Muslim family law, by the Muslim minority community in South Africa. She has undertaken socio-legal, empirical research in the areas of Islamic divorce and inheritance in order to identify the disparities between the theory of law and the lived reality of the law, as experienced by the Muslim community in South Africa. 

Essop has a PhD from the University of Cape Town (UCT) where her thesis focused on the intersection between the Islamic laws of inheritance and the South African laws of inheritance, and has lectured on the Interpretation of Statutes in UCT’s Law Faculty. She also has a BA degree in Arabic and Islamic law from the International Peace College of South Africa and a Certificate in Islamic Finance from the ETHICA Institute of Islamic Finance based in the United Arab Emirates.

Rami Koujah

Research editor, islamic law blog, 2022-2023.

Rami Koujah is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His dissertation is on the concept of personhood in Islamic law and legal theory. Rami earned his JD from Stanford Law School, MSt from Oxford University, and a joint BA/MA from UCLA.

Hadi Qazwini

Hadi Qazwini is an educator and researcher. His scholarly interests are in Islamic intellectual history, with a focus on theology, law, and Imāmī Shīʿīsm. He completed his Ph.D. in Religious and Islamic Studies at the University of Southern California. His dissertation, titled “The Islamic Debate on Juristic In/Fallibility ( al-takhṭi ʾ a wa al-taṣwīb ) and the Construction of Competing Orthodoxies,” explores the intellectual and practical underpinnings of the debate in Islamic legal theory over whether all legal experts are correct ( kullu mujtahid muṣīb ). In addition to pursuing the academic study of Islam, Hadi obtained advanced training in the Shīʿī seminary ( al-ḥawza al-ʿilmiyya ) in Qum, Iran, specializing in the traditional study of Islamic thought and practice. He recently published a peer-reviewed article in   Islamic Studies   entitled “Heir of the Prophets: Veneration of Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī and the Socio-Religious Positioning of Twelver Shiism.” He is in the early stages of writing a book, tentatively titled   Islam and the Problem of Truth: An Intellectual History . In addition to his scholarly work, Hadi serves in several non-profit organizations in the areas of higher education and international development and relief.

Raha Rafii is currently an Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, where she was previously a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the Law and Learning in Imami Shi‘i Islam ERC project. She received her PhD in 2019 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania and specializes in medieval Islamic history, jurisprudence, and Arabic and Persian historiography.  As an American Society of Legal History Wallace Johnson First Book Fellow, she is working on turning her dissertation into a book titled  Imagining the Islamic Judge: The  Adab al-qadi  Genre . Focusing on the standard legal genre of  adab al-qāḍī , or judicial protocol, the book project focuses on the impacts and intersections of non-legal literatures on  adab al-qāḍī  works. In addition to her research specialization, she also publishes on digital humanities, museums, and orientalism in both academic and public-facing outlets.

She received her B.S. in International Politics from Georgetown University and masters’ degrees in both Oriental Studies and Jewish Studies from the University of Oxford. She has also held a Fulbright scholarship in Egypt as well as a Legal Theory Fellowship at Cardozo Law School.

Simon Loynes

Research editor, 2020-2022.

Simon is a Research Editor at the Program in Islamic Law. He has previously worked as part of the Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book project at the Aga Khan University, London. He is a specialist in the Qur’an and is particularly interested in its literary aspects, its relationship to early Arabic poetry, and its place in Late Antiquity. His research also applies Digital Humanities methodologies to the study of the Qur’an, and he interested, more broadly, in the digitisation of Arabic texts and the challenges presented by building large-scale digital corpora.

His first monograph, "Revelation in the Qur’an," investigates the Qur’anic concept of revelation through the roots n-z-l and w-ḥ-y, was published in early 2021 in Brill’s Texts and Studies on the Qurʾān series (Brill, 2021).

He holds a PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh (2019) and a MA in Islamic Societies and Cultures from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2014). 

Haroun Rahimi

Global mesa fellow, 2022-2023.

Haroun  Rahimi is an Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Afghanistan and a Visiting Professor of Law at Bocconi University School of Law and is a Global Academy Scholar at MESA.. His research focuses on economic laws, institutional reform, Islamic finance, and divergent conceptions of rule of law in Muslim and modern thoughts, and religious authority, and his research has appeared in reputable local and international journals. Rahimi has also collaborated as an independent consultant with a number of research firms and policy think tanks conducting policy research on institutional development and good governance in the South Asia context. At the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, he has worked on Islamic finance as a poverty alleviation strategy, the legal history of Afghanistan, and the ways that legal transplantation is legitimized in Muslim countries.

Rahimi was a visiting scholar at the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) in Rome. He obtained his B.A. in Law from Herat University, his LLM in Global Business Law, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Aliya Zuberi

Aliya Zuberi is a 2L at Harvard Law School. She holds a BA in History from Barnard College.

Sithy Ermiza Tegal

Research affiliate, spring 2023.

Ermiza Tegal is a lawyer and activist from Sri Lanka. She has a Master of Laws from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London with a specialization in Law, Governance and Development. Her work encompasses addressing gender-based violence, ensuring civil liberty protections in counter terror responses, ensuring minority rights, defending rights and protection for victims of torture, promoting people-centred land policies and the securing freedom of assembly and expression of non-governmental civil society organizations. Ermiza leads a legal chamber specializing in public law and family law. Her practice litigates on issues of constitutional law and administrative law mainly representating victims of discrimination, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention and domestic violence.

Ermiza is a co-founder of  Muslim Personal Law Reform Action Group  (MPLRAG) which works for Muslim family law reforms. Ermiza currently serves as a legal expert on governmental advisory committees on Muslim law reform and Family law reform in Sri Lanka. Her publications include  “Inside the Quazi Courts of Sri Lanka” , Failing Women Everyday: Legal Protection for Domestic Violence Victims in Sri Lanka”, “ Towards Understanding Female Genital Cutting in Sri Lanka ” , “ Exposed and Alone: Torture Survivors in Sri Lanka bear the burden of their own protection ” and “Prevention of Terrorism Act, Rule of Law and Human Security”.

AbdurRahman Bhatti

Research intern, summer 2023.

AbdurRahman Bhatti is an engineering student at Princeton with an interest in solving major problems using technology and entrepreneurship. In parallel with his studies, AbdurRahman ran a Techstars-backed augmented reality/fitness startup called Ghost Pacer for five years that generated seven figures in annual revenue. During that time, he also managed a 35-person engineering team and filed for 7 patents across various fields.

Dilyara Agisheva

Research editor, 2023-2024.

Dilyara Agisheva received an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from UCLA and an M.A. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University. As a Ph.D. student at Georgetown University, she specialized in Islamic legal studies and Ottoman history. In August 2021, she defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Entangled Legal Formations: Crimea Under Russian Rule in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” Her doctoral research was supported by scholarships and grants, including the Heath W. Lowry Dissertation Writing Fellowship of Distinction from the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship.  Dilyara was also the inaugural PIL-LC Research Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law. 

Sultan Mehmood

Research affiliate, 2023-2024.

Sultan Mehmood is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the New Economic School of Moscow and a research affiliate at the Harvard Law School’s Program in Islamic Law. He is also a faculty research fellow at Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) and Pakistan Institute of Development Studies (PIDE) in Pakistan.

Professor Mehmood is engaged in pioneering research on judicial reforms in the Global South, with a particular focus on his home country, Pakistan. His research methodology involves harnessing large datasets and careful attention to legal theory to provide insights into reforming the judiciary, promoting political rights, with a specific emphasis on studying the prerequisites for establishing the rule of law within societies. His work has been accepted or published in prestigious scientific outlets, including Nature, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, The Economic Journal, and the Journal of Development Economics.

Professor Mehmood will be responsible for assisting in the acquisition and digitization of collections of judgments dating back to the country's independence in 1947. This effort is part of the larger project to create an online Resource Database for judicial decisions in Pakistan, which will also include the development of related AI and training tools and research papers.

Website: sultanmehmood.info

Twitter: @mrsultan713

Ali Rida Rizek

Ali Rida Rizek is a Research Editor at the Program in Islamic Law. He received his PhD, Arabic and Islamic Studies - University of Göttingen, 2021) is a scholar of social and intellectual history of Islam, with special focus on Twelver Shi’ism. His research focuses on the history of Islamic law, Qur’anic studies, Arabic literature, and classical Islamic education and his dissertation (2021) examines the life, work, and impact of two early Imami legal scholars, namely Ibn Abī ʿAqīl al-ʿUmānī and Ibn al-Junayd al-Iskāfī (both flourishing in the 4 th /10 th century). Rizek has taught at the American University of Beirut (AUB), the Lebanese American University (LAU), the University of Leiden, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Bayreuth in Germany and has published studies on hadith, legal history, and the classical Islamic ethical discourse. He received his BA and MA in Arabic Language and Literature from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon. 

Marwa Sharafeldin

Research affiliate, 2022-2024.

Dr. Marwa Sharafeldin is an Egyptian scholar activist. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School. She is also the Senior Advisor in Musawah the Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family. Dr. Sharafeldin has a PhD in Socio-Legal Studies from the Law Faculty in the University of Oxford and a Masters in Development Management from the London School of Economics. Her work covers the intersection between Islamic law, international human rights law, and feminist activism. 

Her publications include “Islamic Law Meets Human Rights: Reformulating Qiwama and Wilaya for Personal Status Law Reform Advocacy in Egypt”; “Gender and Equality in Muslim Family Law”; “Challenges of Islamic Feminism in Personal Status Law Reform in Egypt”. She co-founded and served on the Executive and Advisory Boards of several international, regional and national feminist organizations such as Musawah, the Global Fund for Women, the Young Arab Feminist Network, and the Network for Women’s Rights Organisations in Egypt. Dr. Sharafeldin is also a technical expert for the publication of several regional and international reports such as the UN's Progress of the World's Women Report and the UN's Gender Justice and Law Arab Region Report. She believes in the power of art for social transformation, and is a story collector,  performer and  writer.

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Teaching & Learning

A landmark moment for zero-l.

Participants, faculty, and staff celebrate the completion of the inaugural cohort of individual learners to go through Harvard Law’s online legal fundamentals course

Diana Staley has spent her life trying to make a difference, in the lives of fellow colleagues and in the restaurant industry, where she’s worked for years. For Staley, who will be attending Harvard Kennedy School this fall, the online legal fundamentals course she completed this spring at Harvard Law School helped fuel her advocacy work.

“I see the law as an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others,” she said, reflecting on her experience. A 1985 Harvard College graduate, Staley has a diverse professional background, from serving as president of the National Restaurant Association to owner of Reverie Kitchen in Branford, Connecticut to a period as a tennis pro and championship squash player.

Called Zero-L, the self-paced course covering fundamental elements of the law was originally designed to prepare students for their first year at Harvard Law School. Taught by leading Harvard Law faculty members, it was previously offered exclusively to incoming Harvard Law students, then to other law schools, which made the material available to their matriculants. (The name Zero-L is a play on the traditional terms for first-, second-, and third-year law students — 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls).

But this year, the course was opened for the first time to individual users interested in participating, whether they are about to enter law school, exploring whether to apply to law school, or just want to learn about the American legal system.

Staley’s longstanding desire to make a difference, she explained in a recent interview, “was amplified when I went to Washington to advocate for independent restaurants, the second largest independent employer in America, that were shuttered by the government during the pandemic.” When her advocacy proved unsuccessful, she took it “as a message that I needed to do even more to help.”

One way to do that, she realized, was to learn more about the law. And Zero-L provided her with the perfect opportunity. “For me, the class reignited my love of the law, that it can be a positive force to achieve change.” She is now tentatively planning to apply to Harvard Law School once she graduates from the Kennedy School.

This first run of this six-week course for individual learners, which wrapped up with an online celebration, including faculty comments and a mini learning exercise, via Zoom in late June, marked a milestone for Zero-L.

“This celebration was a big deal for us,” said Leah Plunkett ’06 , Harvard Law School’s associate dean of Learning Experience and Innovation and executive director of Harvard Law School Online. “It represented the completion of the inaugural cohort of individual learners to go through our Zero-L course.”

Explaining the law school’s decision to expand access to anyone who might be interested, Plunkett said it was the logical next step after having proved its worth for incoming law students at Harvard and beyond.

“Because it was such a huge success in welcoming students through their law school, we wanted to open it up to individual learners throughout the world who may be about to start law school themselves, or maybe just want to learn a little more,” she said. “Our celebration welcomed more than 100 leaners from throughout the world. That’s not the full number who went through the run of the course, but we were thrilled at the turnout.”

Zero-L, she noted, remains available to participants for a year afterwards to be used as a reference tool.

“The hope is that [Zero-L] really gives you an opportunity to feel what it’s like to be in an HLS classroom … Maybe it inspires you, if you’ve been on the fence to start thinking about law school. And to really get excited about the law, which is the goal of this program.” Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03, deputy dean and faculty co-director of Harvard Law School Online

June’s Zoom celebration featured remarks from John Goldberg , interim dean of Harvard Law School and the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, and deputy deans and faculty directors of Harvard Law School Online, Professors John Coates and I. Glenn Cohen ’03 . Said Plunkett, “The gathering offered the students an opportunity to take those newly acquired skills out for a spin in real time with a Harvard University faculty member.”

In his remarks, Goldberg underlined the significance of Zero-L becoming available to individuals. “We’re really excited to have taken the next step … and we’re hoping that this will enable thousands more who haven’t enrolled in law school, or don’t plan to, to get the benefit of this incredible resource.”

Goldberg, who taught a section on tort law for Zero-L, noted that law and lawyers have always played “a huge role” in American history. Nearly 250 years after its founding, he said, “law remains at the center of our political culture. We see it in everything from momentous Supreme Court decisions to ordinary consumer transactions.” That, he believes, is why it is important for these and future Zero-L students gain a working knowledge of the law. “This is why I’m so happy to see you all here,” he said.

“There has not traditionally been a name for people who were about to start law school, coming into law school, thinking about applying or interested in law,” Coates, who teaches and writes about contracts, law and economic, and corporate and regulatory law, said in his remarks. He explained that Harvard Law School “came up with Zero-L as the idea to capture” these important phases and added that, as “we’ve become more global over time, we thought it useful to provide the contents of this course to learners like you around the world.” 

Cohen, who focuses on health law and policy, led a virtual interactive classroom exercise focused on a real case and encouraged the learners to examine it from every angle. He chose Doe vs. United Services Life Insurance , a 1988 case in which the plaintiff alleged he was given a higher life insurance premium because he was (incorrectly) presumed to be gay, during a time of social stigma amid the AIDS epidemic. Through Zoom chat and interactive polling, students were invited to identify and consider the main issue of the case (whether the plaintiff should have the right to proceed pseudonymously), what the court drew on to reach its conclusion, and what implications permitting pseudonymity has for cause lawyering and other forms of litigation.

“The hope is that this really gives you an opportunity to feel what it’s like to be in an HLS classroom,” Cohen said. “Maybe it inspires you, if you’ve been on the fence to start thinking about law school. And to really get excited about the law, which is the goal of this program.”

One of the program participants, Eileen Harvey, said the Zero-L course benefitted her work in textbook publishing.

“I’ve been doing a lot of contract work and felt I needed to have a better understanding of the basics,” she said. “It’s given me more than I expected in understanding the levels of law, from reading a brief to understanding [contract] terms. I do publishing contracts, vendor contracts and translation agreements, so this has focused my mind on what I might want to include and exclude. … It showed me how contract law is different from real estate law, and how that is different from criminal law and civil procedure.”

Another participant, Kevin Dale Martin, came to Zero-L through a lifelong interest in law.

“My interest sparked early in my life, stemming from my personal experience as an African American foster youth under the guardianship of Children and Youth Services provided by the state. This unique perspective exposed me to the complexities of the legal system from a very young age, highlighting its power to protect,” he said. “My Zero-L experience was immensely valuable. It laid a strong foundation for my legal education and future career in law. It demystified many aspects of the law school journey, making the future transition to the study of law smoother and less daunting.”

• Professor Glenn Cohen discusses how Harvard Law course can help prepare incoming law students across America
• Common knowledge: Zero-L helps prime incoming students for success

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