The Rule of Law and Muslim Societies

Session One of the Center’s new Legal Cultures in Muslim Societies Series, sponsored in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations; featuring Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School and Nathan Brown of George Washington University, moderated by Karen J. Greenberg, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security

SPEAKER BIOS

Noah Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, faculty director of The Center on Law and Security, and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. He specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory.  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 He has authored three books, Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton University Press, 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

Nathan Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University,  and a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is a distinguished scholar and author of four well-received books on Arab politics.  Brown brings his special expertise on Palestinian reform and Arab constitutionalism to the Endowment and his research interests also include Egyptian and Palestinian politics, legal reform in the modern Middle East, as well as democratization.  Brown’s most recent book, Resuming Arab Palestine, presents research on Palestinian society and governance after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.

MODERATOR

Karen J. Greenberg is the executive director of The Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law and the editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (with Joshua Dratel), The Torture Debate in America, and Al Qaeda Now: Understanding Today’s Terrorists.