harvard thesis law

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.

While Sandel argues that pursuing perfection through genetic engineering would decrease our sense of humility, he claims that the sense of solidarity we would lose is also important.

This thesis summarizes several points in Sandel’s argument, but it does not make a claim about how we should understand his argument. A reader who read Sandel’s argument would not also need to read an essay based on this descriptive thesis.  

Broad thesis (arguable, but difficult to support with evidence) 

Michael Sandel’s arguments about genetic engineering do not take into consideration all the relevant issues.

This is an arguable claim because it would be possible to argue against it by saying that Michael Sandel’s arguments do take all of the relevant issues into consideration. But the claim is too broad. Because the thesis does not specify which “issues” it is focused on—or why it matters if they are considered—readers won’t know what the rest of the essay will argue, and the writer won’t know what to focus on. If there is a particular issue that Sandel does not address, then a more specific version of the thesis would include that issue—hand an explanation of why it is important.  

Arguable thesis with analytical claim 

While Sandel argues persuasively that our instinct to “remake” (54) ourselves into something ever more perfect is a problem, his belief that we can always draw a line between what is medically necessary and what makes us simply “better than well” (51) is less convincing.

This is an arguable analytical claim. To argue for this claim, the essay writer will need to show how evidence from the article itself points to this interpretation. It’s also a reasonable scope for a thesis because it can be supported with evidence available in the text and is neither too broad nor too narrow.  

Arguable thesis with normative claim 

Given Sandel’s argument against genetic enhancement, we should not allow parents to decide on using Human Growth Hormone for their children.

This thesis tells us what we should do about a particular issue discussed in Sandel’s article, but it does not tell us how we should understand Sandel’s argument.  

Questions to ask about your thesis 

• Is the thesis truly arguable? Does it speak to a genuine dilemma in the source, or would most readers automatically agree with it?  
• Is the thesis too obvious? Again, would most or all readers agree with it without needing to see your argument?  
• Is the thesis complex enough to require a whole essay's worth of argument?  
• Is the thesis supportable with evidence from the text rather than with generalizations or outside research?  
• Would anyone want to read a paper in which this thesis was developed? That is, can you explain what this paper is adding to our understanding of a problem, question, or topic?
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What is a thesis?

What is a dissertation, getting started, staying on track.

A thesis is a long-term project that you work on over the course of a semester or a year. Theses have a very wide variety of styles and content, so we encourage you to look at prior examples and work closely with faculty to develop yours. 

Before you begin, make sure that you are familiar with the dissertation genre—what it is for and what it looks like.

Generally speaking, a dissertation’s purpose is to prove that you have the expertise necessary to fulfill your doctoral-degree requirements by showing depth of knowledge and independent thinking.

The form of a dissertation may vary by discipline. Be sure to follow the specific guidelines of your department.

• PhD This site directs candidates to the GSAS website about dissertations , with links to checklists,  planning, formatting, acknowledgments, submission, and publishing options. There is also a link to guidelines for the prospectus . Consult with your committee chair about specific requirements and standards for your dissertation.
• DDES This document covers planning, patent filing, submission guidelines, publishing options, formatting guidelines, sample pages, citation guidelines, and a list of common errors to avoid. There is also a link to guidelines for the prospectus .
• Scholarly Pursuits (GSAS) This searchable booklet from Harvard GSAS is a comprehensive guide to writing dissertations, dissertation-fellowship applications, academic journal articles, and academic job documents.

Finding an original topic can be a daunting and overwhelming task. These key concepts can help you focus and save time.

Finding a topic for your dissertation should start with a research question that excites or at least interests you. A rigorous, engaging, and original dissertation will require continuous curiosity about your topic, about your own thoughts on the topic, and about what other scholars have said on your topic. Avoid getting boxed in by thinking you know what you want to say from the beginning; let your research and your writing evolve as you explore and fine-tune your focus through constant questioning and exploration.

Get a sense of the broader picture before you narrow your focus and attempt to frame an argument. Read, skim, and otherwise familiarize yourself with what other scholars have done in areas related to your proposed topic. Briefly explore topics tangentially related to yours to broaden your perspective and increase your chance of finding a unique angle to pursue.

Critical Reading

Critical reading is the opposite of passive reading. Instead of merely reading for information to absorb, critical reading also involves careful, sustained thinking about what you are reading. This process may include analyzing the author’s motives and assumptions, asking what might be left out of the discussion, considering what you agree with or disagree with in the author’s statements and why you agree or disagree, and exploring connections or contradictions between scholarly arguments. Here is a resource to help hone your critical-reading skills:

http://writing.umn.edu/sws/assets/pdf/quicktips/criticalread.pdf

Conversation

Your dissertation will incorporate some of the ideas of the other scholars whose work you researched. By reading critically and following your curiosity, you will develop your own ideas and claims, and these contributions are the core of your dissertation. However, your dissertation will also acknowledge the work of scholars who came before you, and you must accurately and fairly attribute this work and define your place within the larger discussion. Make sure that you know how to quote, summarize, paraphrase , integrate , and cite secondary sources to avoid plagiarism and to show the depth and breadth of your knowledge.

A thesis is a long-term, large project that involves both research and writing; it is easy to lose focus, motivation, and momentum. Here are suggestions for achieving the result you want in the time you have.

The dissertation is probably the largest project you have undertaken, and a lot of the work is self-directed. The project can feel daunting or even overwhelming unless you break it down into manageable pieces and create a timeline for completing each smaller task. Be realistic but also challenge yourself, and be forgiving of yourself if you miss a self-imposed deadline here and there.

Your program will also have specific deadlines for different requirements, including establishing a committee, submitting a prospectus, completing the dissertation, defending the dissertation, and submitting your work. Consult your department’s website for these dates and incorporate them into the timeline for your work.

Accountability

Sometimes self-imposed deadlines do not feel urgent unless there is accountability to someone beyond yourself. To increase your motivation to complete tasks on schedule, set dates with your committee chair to submit pre-determined pieces of a chapter. You can also arrange with a fellow doctoral student to check on each other’s progress. Research and writing can be lonely, so it is also nice to share that journey with someone and support each other through the process.

Common Pitfalls

The most common challenges for students writing a dissertation are writer’s block, information-overload, and the compulsion to keep researching forever.

There are many strategies for avoiding writer’s block, such as freewriting, outlining, taking a walk, starting in the middle, and creating an ideal work environment for your particular learning style. Pay attention to what helps you and try different things until you find what works.

Efficient researching techniques are essential to avoiding information-overload. Here are a couple of resources about strategies for finding sources and quickly obtaining essential information from them.

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/writing_in_literature_detailed_discussion/reading_criticism.html

https://students.dartmouth.edu/academic-skills/learning-resources/learning-strategies/reading-techniques

Finally, remember that there is always more to learn and your dissertation cannot incorporate everything. Follow your curiosity but also set limits on the scope of your work. It helps to create a folder entitled “future projects” for topics and sources that interest you but that do not fit neatly into the dissertation. Also remember that future scholars will build off of your work, so leave something for them to do.

Browsing through theses and dissertations of the past can help to get a sense of your options and gain inspiration but be careful to use current guidelines and refer to your committee instead of relying on these examples for form or formatting.

DASH Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard.

HOLLIS Harvard Library’s catalog provides access to ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global .

MIT Architecture has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

Rhode Island School of Design has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

University of South Florida has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

Harvard GSD has a list of projects, including theses and professors’ research.

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The Journal is one of the most widely circulated law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.

The late Stephen Eberhard and former Senator and Secretary of Energy E. Spencer Abraham founded the journal forty years ago and many journal alumni have risen to prominent legal positions in the government and at the nation’s top law firms.

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Harvard Law Review

Volume 137 issue 7 may 2024, in memoriam: justice sandra day o’connor.

The editors of the Harvard Law Review respectfully dedicate this issue to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

• John G. Roberts Jr.
• Stephen G. Breyer
• Justin Driver
• Cristina Rodríguez
• Stewart J. Schwab
• Eugene Volokh

Bail at the Founding

• Kellen R. Funk
• Sandra G. Mayson

The Second Coming of Political Liberalism

The role of certiorari in emergency relief, “hereinafter”: workplace protections, the state attorney general’s settlement toolkit, and injunctive relief, kānāwai from ahi: revitalizing the hawai‘i water code in the wake of the maui wildfires, halting administrative action in the supreme court, the presumption against novelty in the roberts court’s separation-of-powers case law, kiviti v. bhatt.

Fourth Circuit Holds that Article III Mootness Doctrine Does Not Apply to Bankruptcy Proceedings.

Colindres v. United States Department of State

D.C. Circuit Defers to Consulate’s Visa Denial.

K & R Contractors, LLC v. Keene

Fourth Circuit Declines to Consider Constitutionality of Removal Protections Because of Lack of Injury.

Lee ex rel. Gap, Inc. v. Fisher

Ninth Circuit Enforces Forum Selection Clause Blocking Derivative Suits.

Doe v. William Marsh Rice University

Fifth Circuit Advances Novel Theory of Liability for Anti-Male Discrimination.

Letter From Gavin Newsom, Governor Of California, To Members Of The California State Senate (Sept. 30, 2023)

California Governor Vetoes Bill to Extend Occupational Health and Safety Protections to Domestic Workers.

Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, S. 1876, 118th Cong. (2023)

U.S. Senate Introduces Mandatory Reporting And Disclosure Law For Social Media Platforms.

About the Harvard Law Review

Founded in 1887, the Harvard Law Review is a student-run journal of legal scholarship. The Review is independent from the Harvard Law School and a board of student editors selected through an anonymous annual writing competition make all editorial decisions. The print Review and its online companion, the Forum , are published monthly from November through June. The Review , the Forum , and online Blog welcome submissions throughout the year.

What Happened to Traceability?

• Joshua Perry

“An Arbitrary Fraction”: How the Family and Medical Leave Act Fails Rural Workers

• Melanie Hagerman

Honoring Statutory Restraint in Conflicts Analysis

• Katherine Florey

Bending Gender: Disability Justice, Abolitionist Queer Theory, and ADA Claims for Gender Dysphoria

Voluntary prosecution and the case of animal rescue.

• Justin Marceau
• Wayne Hsiung
• Steffen Seitz

Extrajudicial Segregation: Challenging Solitary Confinement in Immigration Prisons

• Felipe De Jesús Hernández

The Constitution of Difference

• Guy-Uriel E. Charles
• Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer

Methodological Convergence in Community Financial Services

• Elias Neibart

Community Financial Services and the Intramural Debate over Novelty and Tradition

• Thomas E. Nielsen

On the Limits of ADA Inclusion for Trans People 

• A.D. Sean Lewis

Civil Suits by Parents Against Family Policing Agencies

• Alexa Richardson

Originalism Makes Sense: A Response

A thought experiment: does originalism make sense.

• In Kyu Chung

More from the Archives

Coloring in the fourth amendment.

• Daniel S. Harawa

Non-extraterritoriality

• Carlos M. Vázquez

Contract-Wrapped Property

• Danielle D’Onfro

Transinstitutional Policing

• Sunita Patel

Interrogating Dominion: On Political Theology and Summary Process Eviction in Connecticut

• James Stevenson Ramsey

The Anti-Klan Act in the Twenty-First Century

• William M. Carter Jr.

Book Reviews

Will the real shareholder primacy please stand up.

• Ann M. Lipton

Unshielded: How the Police Can Become Touchable

• Brandon Hasbrouck

Remembering Judy Heumann

• Robyn M. Powell

Honoring Judy Heumann’s Legacy

• Michael Ashley Stein

Recently Cited

The student pieces featured below have been recently cited in judicial opinions and legal scholarship.

Shinn v. Ramirez

United states v. tuggle, freedom from religion foundation, inc. v. mack, united states v. varner, uzuegbunam v. preczewski, transunion v. ramirez, haskins v. 3m co., payday, vehicle title, and certain high-cost installment loans, revitch v. directv, llc, wilson v. houston community college system, geofence warrants and the fourth amendment, mcgirt v. oklahoma.

Honors & Theses

The Honors Thesis: An opportunity to do innovative and in-depth research.  

An honors thesis gives students the opportunity to conduct in-depth research into the areas of government that inspire them the most. Although, it’s not a requirement in the Department of Government, the honors thesis is both an academic challenge and a crowning achievement at Harvard. The faculty strongly encourages students to write an honors thesis and makes itself available as a resource to those students who do. Students work closely with the thesis advisor of their choice throughout the writing process. Approximately 30% of Government concentrators each year choose to write a thesis.

Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Government  

You undoubtedly have many questions about what writing a thesis entails. We have answers for you. Please read  A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Government , which you can download as a PDF below. If you still have questions or concerns after you have read through this document, we encourage you to reach out to the Director of Undergraduate Studies, Dr. Nara Dillon ( [email protected] ), the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies, Dr. Gabriel Katsh ( [email protected] ), or the Undergraduate Program Manager, Karen Kaletka ( [email protected] ).  

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China lands on moon's far side in historic sample-retrieval mission.

The landing elevates China's space-power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases.

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Charles Law (Harvard Ph.D. 2023) wins the IAU Division H PhD Thesis Prize for 2023!

Program in Islamic Law

Research Fellows & Editors

Research Affiliate, 2022-Present

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-present.

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

Reema Doleh

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

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.

Cem Tecimer

Research assistant, 2016-present.

Cem Tecimer is an SJD Candidate at Harvard Law 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.

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.

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.  

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.  

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.

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.

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Integrative biology concentrator julie heng awarded hoopes prize for thesis research conducted in the murray lab.

• May 30, 2024

Integrative Biology (IB) concentrator Julie Heng (‘24) has won a Hoopes Prize for thesis research she did in the Murray Lab . The university-wide Hoopes Prize celebrates excellence in undergraduate thesis work across all disciplines.

“It has been an extraordinary pleasure to work with Julie,” says MCB faculty Andrew Murray . “She had the courage to work on a poorly characterized genetic process, parameiosis, the persistence to complete and analyze a complicated and difficult set of experiments, and elegance and clarity to write an inspiring and beautiful thesis.”

IB concentrators typically conduct their thesis research in OEB labs, but Heng connected with Murray while she was a student in the course LS50. Once in the lab, Heng worked closely with postdoc María Angélica Bravo Núñez as her lab mentor . “One day after Zoom class, Andrew and I were talking about mating type switching and chromosomal change, and he invited me to do research in his lab over the summer,” Heng says. “Andrew talked about how the Murray Lab uses brewer’s yeast to examine all kinds of questions in experimental evolution, from the emergence of multicellularity to origins of the cell cycle. Brewer’s yeast seemed like a cool model for questions of non-Darwinian evolution and which I was thinking about. And I’ve had a blast and a half learning from everyone in the lab.”

For her thesis project, Heng looked into the fungus Candida albicans and the mechanisms that can cause it to have irregular numbers of chromosomes, or aneuploidy. Understanding how aneuploidy develops could shed light on how fungal pathogens evolve drug resistance. “In this thesis, I developed two models that examine the relationship between and consequences of non-meiotic chromosome loss and aneuploidy. The first model studies an elusive chromosome loss process in C. albicans called “parameiosis.” I showed that 1) parameiosis rapidly generates aneuploidy, which increases population-wide variation in growth, fitness, and antifungal drug tolerance and 2) most strains that lose chromosomes also become more fit and drug tolerant. The second model discovers novel chromosome loss pathways in brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae . Using genetic crosses, I mapped the chromosome loss phenotype of a representative strain to a mutation (I425F) in the gene TDA9 and confirmed its role by CRISPR engineering.” 

“I’m deeply grateful to Prof. Andrew Murray, who is kind and brilliant and full of aphoristic wisdom,” Heng adds. “Endless gratitude to María Angélica Bravo Núñez, HHMI postdoctoral fellow in the lab, who taught me just about everything, from how to use a pipette properly on day one. María is a role model and an inspiration, one of the hardest working and supportive people I know, and I have deeply enjoyed learning from and with her, whether seriously interrogating problems in academia or bantering about the rise of the fungi together. Thanks also to the rest of the Murray Lab, a delightful team that banters with and challenges each other: Abe Sabbarini, Alexa Pérez-Torres, Piyush Nanda, Jimena Luque, Athena Rogers, Kevin Woods, and of course Linda Kefalas.” Heng, who earned a secondary in Philosophy alongside her IB concentration, will work on technology policy after graduation. “During college, these two interests [evolution and ethics] dovetailed, especially with the rise and dynamism of emerging technologies,” she says. “My research looks at rapid change in biological systems, but this mirrors social systems as well. So much is changing; how should we think about biotech and AI, about wellbeing and risk, about community and loneliness? Current conversations about science and technology are narrow and exclusive, but can still have outsized impact on how we all live. I’m planning to pursue emerging tech policy to help make these conversations more pluralistic and more focused on well-being.”

Heng’s colleagues and mentors praised her ingenuity. “Julie arrived at the Murray lab as an incredibly curious, smart student with minimal lab skills,” says Murray Lab postdoc María Angélica Bravo Núñez, who mentored Heng. “She is, however, incredibly dedicated and from the beginning showed that her detective skills were second to none. During her first summer in the lab, I gave a strain to Julie that had >30 mutations and she needed to find which of those mutations was causing the phenotype. By the end of the summer, not only had Julie mapped the causative allele, but she had also reconstructed it and tested it in a naïve background. That was not an easy task, yet she executed it flawlessly.”

Bravo Núñez adds, “Julie is an incredible scientist that doesn’t shy away from hard questions. For her thesis project, she ventured into understanding the mechanism and implications of an unknown cell cycle in a human fungal pathogen. For her work and dedication, the thesis reviewers granted her an ‘exceptional’ score and she was also awarded the Hoopes prize. She deserves this and so much more. And while we (The Murray Lab) are sad to see her go, we are also very excited to see how Julie will change the world next.”

Julie Heng (left) and María Angélica Bravo Núñez

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Economics Thesis Prize Winners

The Economics Department sends our heartfelt congratulations to our Class of 2024 graduating ec seniors ! It has been a joy and honor to have you in the Department, and we are glad you chose to concentrate in economics. We wish you all a very happy graduation and best of luck in the years ahead.

We would also like to congratulate some of our thesis writers who have received awards.

Each year the Economics Department awards four prizes to graduating economics thesis writers. 

Jay Garg was awarded the Seymour E. and Ruth B. Harris Prize for his outstanding thesis, “Opium, Poppy Eradication, and State Collapse in China” advised by Professor Melissa Dell. 

Hemanth Asirvatham was awarded the Allyn A. Young Prize for his outstanding thesis, “The Dynamo Is Not the Computer: A Historical Exploration of What Makes Tech Adoption Faster” advised by Professor Andrei Shleifer. 

Sara Moore was awarded the Morris Kronfeld Prize for demonstrating exceptional academic growth during her college years and for excellence in her thesis, “‘a river of grief’: The Mortality Effects of Water Restoration on Native American Reservations” advised by Dr. Gregory Bruich. 

Aden Barton received the John H. Williams Prize , awarded to the honors senior graduating with the best overall record in economics.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s John T. Dunlop Thesis Prize in Business and Government is awarded to the graduating senior with the best thesis on a challenging public policy issue at the interface of business and government. Congratulations to the 2024 winner of the Dunlop Prize, Aden Barton , for his thesis, “The Causal Effect of Welfare Retrenchment: Evidence from Medicaid and SNAP” advised by Dr. Gregory Bruich.

Finally, we applaud our seven economics thesis writers that received the 2024 Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize . Congratulations to Hemanth Asirvatham , Aden Barton , Jack Fetsch , Jay Garg , Nicholas Hutchison , Pomaikaʻi Ogata , and Shai-Li Ron !

Teaching & Learning

Taylor’s version of copyright.

At a Harvard Law School event, an expert in digital exploitation of intellectual property says Taylor Swift singlehandedly shifted composition copyright considerations

When Taylor Swift began re-recording her old albums and releasing the new, improved “Taylor’s Version,” she did more than delight a nation of Swifties. She also opened significant questions about the role of intellectual property in contract law, and possibly tipped the balance toward artists.

According to Gary R. Greenstein , a technology transactions partner at Wilson Sonsini, the Swift affair is one of many that makes these times especially interesting for copyright law. Greenstein’s current practice focuses on intellectual property, licensing, and commercial transactions, with specialized expertise in the digital exploitation of intellectual property. He appeared at Harvard Law School on March 28 for a lunchtime talk, which was presented and introduced by Chris Bavitz , the WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law and managing director of the law school’s Cyberlaw Clinic. “I have been doing this for 28 years now and there is never a dull moment,” Greenstein said.

Greenstein placed the Swift story in the larger context of music copyrights. In music, he explained, there are always two copyrights. The first is for the musical work itself, and this is usually controlled by the composer/songwriter, or by a publishing company acting on their behalf. The second is the “master,” the recorded performance of the work, and this is usually controlled by the label.

Whenever a song is played in public, one or both of these entities gets paid. In many cases, there are multiple copyright holders — the Bruno Mars hit “Uptown Funk” has six authors — or multiple recordings of the same songs (he noted that Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” has hundreds). “From a licensing point of view, this can be a nightmare,” Greenstein said.

In 2005, a teenaged Taylor Swift signed on to the Big Machine record label and became a global superstar by the time she left the company in 2018. By that time, she’d recorded six albums for the label, all multimillion sellers.

Soon afterward, Big Machine was purchased by her longtime business nemesis — “to Swifties, the hated Scooter Braun,” as Greenstein called him. (The two had longstanding bad blood, and Swift had referred to Braun as a bully and a manipulator). Braun in turn sold Big Machine, including the Swift albums it owned, to another company, Shamrock Holdings, for $420 million. Greenstein said that he was involved in the Big Machine deal but was not free to share details.

Rather than buy into this agreement, Swift announced she would remake the albums. Under her new record deal with Universal Music Group, she’d now own whatever masters she produced. Because she is usually the main songwriter, she would already have rights to the musical works. As the author and owner of her newest masters, Swift now has majority control of her work. Hence, Greenstein said, he’d need to pay Swift royalties if he played one of her songs during the lecture.

No major artist had previously invested the time and energy to re-record their catalogue, but Swift’s move paid off, as the new versions were major commercial and critical successes. When Greenstein asked the class whether they listened to the originals or to Taylor’s Version, most picked the latter.

“Does that sound good to Shamrock Holdings?” he asked, to negative response. “Congratulations,” Greenstein said, “You just passed Contracts 101.”

As a result, he said, Shamrock now owned something far less valuable. They could still sell the original albums, but there is now less demand for them. And because Swift holds licensing rights as the creator of the musical work, she can make sure that the lucrative licensing deals (for movies, television, etc.) go to her own versions rather than Big Machine’s.

Of the six Big Machine albums, the only two she hasn’t yet re-recorded are the first, called “Taylor Swift,” and the last, “Reputation.” Thus, according to one of Greenstein’s slides, “All she has left to recover are her name and ‘Reputation.’”

It’s significant, Greenstein said, that the first Taylor’s Version wasn’t released until she’d been off Big Machine for three years. Until then, she was legally bound not to re-record any of the material, and this time frame was typical of record deals in the past. But this is the part of the equation that Swift likely changed for good.

“For decades, major labels were somewhat rational when it came to the prohibition of re-recordings,” Greenstein said.  “But now they’re going to be asking, ‘What’s the risk of a Taylor’s Version?’”

In response, record companies are now trying to prohibit re-recordings for 20 or 30 years, not just two or three. And this has become a key part of contract negotiations. “Will they get 30 years? Probably not, if the lawyer is competent. But they want to make sure that the artist’s vocal cords are not in good shape by the time they get around to re-recording.”

This, he noted, begged the question of why an artist would even want to sign a record contract in the age of TikTok and Spotify. “Number one, there is the pride involved. If you were The Who in the ’60s, you could trash a hotel room and the label would clean up the mess. Of course it would come out of future royalties, but they would do it. But what you have to ask yourself is, is it worth it?”

This may not be an issue for most artists who sign to record labels — but it likely will be for a select few.

“Very few people have the power of a Taylor Swift, but nobody knows who the next Taylor Swift will be,” Greenstein said. “So, if you are a lawyer, you will represent your client zealously.”

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What is BATNA? How to Find Your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement

Always know your batna when entering into a negotiation.

By Guhan Subramanian — on May 2nd, 2024 / BATNA

What is BATNA? The definition, or the ability to identify a negotiator’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement , is among one of the many pieces of information negotiators seek when formulating dealmaking and negotiation strategies . If your current negotiation reaches an impasse, what’s your best outside option?

Most seasoned negotiators understand the value of evaluating their BATNA,  a concept that Roger Fisher, William Ury , and Bruce Patton introduced in their seminal book  Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In .

Claim your FREE copy: BATNA Basics

Discover how to unleash your power at the bargaining table in this free special report, BATNA Basics: Boost Your Power at the Bargaining Table , from Harvard Law School.

A Classic Definition

Here’s a classic illustration of the BATNA negotiation skills concept:

Negotiation skill or negotiation strategy? It’s a bit of both – identifying a negotiator’s BATNA is a necessary skill for developing the best strategies to use at the bargaining table.

Importance of BATNA for Negotiators at the Bargaining Table

When bargaining, take time out for an explicit translation process to ensure that you aren’t giving up a good deal in hand for a BATNA in the bush.

For example, as the renewal deadline for Sam’s homeowner’s insurance policy approached, he decided to do a “market check” to compare prices. Sam’s existing insurer – let’s call it Acme – had been raising rates by 7% and 10% annually for the past three years, and Sam wasn’t sure he was getting the best deal. He then found a carrier that offered a policy for 30% less than Acme’s renewal rate.

Delighted, Sam came very close to switching to the new insurer. But after doing some digging (and receiving some self-interested guidance from Acme), Sam identified important coverage and term definitions buried deep in the legalese of the two policies. After going through a translation process to make the prices comparable, Sam realized that Acme, his current insurer, was offering him a better deal (see also, BATNA and Other Sources of Power at the Negotiation Table to learn more about power in negotiations and how BATNA helps negotiators to make solid strategies for the negotiation table).

The lesson: Rather than assuming that the deal on the table matches your BATNA point by point, translate your BATNA to fully understand what it means for the current negotiation. To learn more, read  Know Your BATNA: The Power of Information in Negotiation .

How have you used any of these strategies in an important negotiation? Leave a comment below.

Adapted from “Taking Your BATNA to the Next Level” by  Guhan Subramanian  in the January 2007 issue of the  Negotiation  newsletter.

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No Responses to “What is BATNA? How to Find Your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement”

2 responses to “what is batna how to find your best alternative to a negotiated agreement”.

Hello, Author! I just finished reading your article on the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School website, and I wanted to reach out and leave a comment. Firstly, I want to express my gratitude for sharing valuable insights on translating BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) to the current deal. Negotiation is an essential skill in various aspects of life, and your article provided practical advice on optimizing the negotiation process.

Your explanation of BATNA and its significance in negotiations was clear and concise. I appreciated how you emphasized the importance of understanding your BATNA before entering into a negotiation, as it provides a benchmark to evaluate the potential outcomes and make informed decisions. Your step-by-step guide on translating BATNA to the current deal was highly informative and offered a systematic approach to improving negotiation outcomes.

Moreover, the examples you provided throughout the article were helpful in illustrating the concept. By demonstrating how different parties can assess their BATNAs and strategically leverage them during negotiations, you showcased the practical application of the theory. It’s evident that a well-defined BATNA can empower negotiators to navigate complex situations and maximize their leverage.

In conclusion, thank you, Author, for sharing your expertise on negotiating and translating BATNA to the current deal. Your article was insightful, well-structured, and provided practical tips that can benefit negotiators at all levels. I believe that understanding and effectively utilizing BATNA is crucial for successful negotiations, and your article serves as a valuable resource in this regard. Keep up the great work, and I look forward to reading more engaging and informative articles from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School!

I recommend adding Ury’s “Getting Past No” to the suggested resources.

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Understanding how to arrange the meeting space is a key aspect of preparing for negotiation. In this video, Professor Guhan Subramanian discusses a real world example of how seating arrangements can influence a negotiator’s success. This discussion was held at the 3 day executive education workshop for senior executives at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Guhan Subramanian is the Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School.

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The Original Public Meaning of Investment Contract

Edward Lee is a Professor of Law at the Santa Clara University School of Law, starting in August 2024. This post is based on his recent article forthcoming in the U.C. Davis Law Review .

The Securities Act of 1933 defines “ security ” by identifying twenty examples of financial instruments or interests that constitute securities. “Investment contract” is the thirteenth example. It has assumed outsized importance in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) enforcement actions against entities that have made public offerings of unregistered securities. Yet, nearly a century since the 1933 Act’s passage, the meaning of “investment contract” is still contested.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the SEC’s ongoing enforcement actions against so-called “crypto asset securities”—a term nowhere in the Securities Act, but one that the SEC has used broadly to describe cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in various actions. According to the SEC, these crypto assets are securities if they are “investment contracts” under the seminal case of SEC v. W.J. Howey Co . , in which the Supreme Court interpreted the term in 1946. Under SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s expansive view , most cryptocurrencies are investment contracts. Even an NFT for a Pokémon card might be.

In “ The Original Public Meaning of Investment Contract ,” I provide historical research of newspapers and dictionaries before and contemporaneous with the enactment of the Securities Act of 1933. This historical research calls into question the SEC’s expansive approach. The research shows that “investment contract” was not a technical term or legal term of art, or neologism created by Congress or state legislatures. The reason Congress didn’t provide a definition of “investment contract” is simple: Congress didn’t create “investment contract.” People did. The term dates back as early as the 1800s, and was based on the ordinary meaning of “investment” and “contract.” People sold investments in contracts—the contract itself was the vehicle for a person’s investment. When Congress enacted the 1933 Act, it adopted the meaning of “investment contract” commonly understood by people at the time. Recognizing this key insight provides clarity—and an important limit—to the term.

The Original Public Meaning of Investment Contract in 1933

Starting in the 1800s, business entities advertised offerings of their “investment contracts” in newspapers. On January 17, 1887, for example, the real estate business the Davidson Company offered its “investment contracts” in an ad published in the St. Paul Daily Globe . The ad explained: “we make investments in St. Paul real estate … under our ‘ Investment Contracts ,’ whereby the party investing is guaranteed his (or her) money back and 6 per cent interest and a share of the profits.” Other real estate investment ventures offered similar investment contracts , which often targeted nonresidents. Even though some offerings, like the Davidson Company’s, purported to purchase the real estate in the name of the investor, the land sale was in name only (as was the case in Howey ). People were buying, not land, but instead, the contract—or the contractual right of receiving “a share of the profits” made by the offeror from its venture.

The term “investment contract” was not limited to real estate ventures. The term was used broadly to apply to an array of investments, including contractual offerings in bonds , insurance , mining businesses , and general, unspecified investments, such as the one offered by the American Contract Co . Often, the ad for the offering stipulated the amount of profits the contracts would putatively yield to investors—for example, the Davidson Company ad “guaranteed his (or her) money back and 6 per cent interest and a share of the profits.” Newspaper ads also sought the hiring of salesmen to sell “investment contracts.” And newspaper articles in the early 1900s reported state and federal prosecutions of fraudulent “investment contracts.”

By 1920, when the Supreme Court of Minnesota first considered a case involving the meaning of “investment contract” in the state’s blue-sky statute, State v. Gopher Tire & Rubber Co. , the term had a well-established meaning: its ordinary meaning. As the Court explained, “The placing of capital or laying out of money in a way intended to secure income or profit from its employment is an ‘investment’ as that word is commonly used and understood .” Although the Court did not define “contract,” there is no indication that the word meant anything other than the ordinary meaning of contract. Indeed, the Court described the certificates at issue in the case in contractual terms: the offeror’s “certificates are like stock in that they give their holders the right to share in the profits of the corporation.” As the Court recognized in two subsequent cases in 1923 and 1927, the state’s blue-sky law regulated “offers to the public of investment contracts evidencing a right to participate in the proceeds of a venture .” Such offerings solicit “the public … to invest money in the contracts [the offerors] propose to sell.”

In 1946, when the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted “investment contract” in the Securities Act in Howey , the Court expressly adopted its contemporaneous meaning “as used by Congress,” a term “the meaning of which had been crystalized by this prior judicial interpretation [ Gopher Tire ]” in 1920. Indeed, as analyzed above, newspaper articles and advertisements before the passage of the 1933 Act show that “investment contract” was a term commonly used in public discourse to refer to a contract offered as an investment.

Under the original public meaning, an investment contract involves a certain type of quid pro quo : individuals “invest money in a common enterprise,” the quid , in exchange for “the expectation that they would earn a profit solely through the efforts of the promoter,” the quo . Or, under Gopher Tire ’s formulation that the Howey Court quoted, one invests “money … to secure income or profit from its employment” by the offeror. Put simply, an investor pays money for the right to the offeror’s profits.

Examining the economic reality and substance of a scheme, such as the land sale plus service agreement in Howey , allows courts to look at what the scheme, in fact, does in operation. The form of an instrument is not dispositive. Of course, it does not have to be titled “investment contract” to be an investment contract. The substance of the financial arrangement is key. The offering of an investment contract may be implied based on the facts , including the conduct, course of dealing, and representations of the parties. But the examination of economic reality under Howey does not allow the courts to ignore the text of the Securities Act—or the original public meaning of investment contract. If the facts indicate there was no offering of a contractual right to receive a share of the offeror’s or venture’s profits—what the Supreme Court described as “ the shares in the enterprise ”—the economic reality is there was no investment contract under the 1933 Act. Every Supreme Court decision finding an investment contract has involved such a contractual right, as summarized by the Brief of Securities Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Support of Coinbase’s Motion. To interpret “investment contract” more broadly to situations completely lacking any such offering of a contractual right would impermissibly read the word “contract” right out of the statute. And it would violate “the core administrative-law principle that an agency may not rewrite clear statutory terms to suit its own sense of how the statute should operate.”

Adhering to the original public meaning of the Securities Act accords with the Supreme Court’s general approach to statutory interpretation. As the Court recently explained , “[t]his Court normally interprets a statute in accord with the ordinary public meaning of its terms at the time of its enactment.” Otherwise, courts “would deny the people the right to continue relying on the original meaning of the law they have counted on to settle their rights and obligations.” This principle serves both due process and the rule of law by providing people with clear notice of the scope of securities law—and by providing a limit to the SEC’s enforcement power.

Requiring Securities Registration of Artwork NFTs Constitutes a Prior Restraint

Nowhere is the need for such transparency apparent than in the SEC’s ad hoc treatment of NFTs. During the boom in the emerging market for NFTs, when sales volume hit $27 billion in 2021, the SEC issued no public guidance on whether NFTs are securities that must be registered before their public sale. NFTs create a new type of property in and embodiment of digital artworks and other creative expression, and offer digital artists a nascent market for their artworks. The SEC’s silence left people in the dark. Then, in the span of just two weeks in 2023, the SEC announced the settlements of enforcement actions against two NFT projects for allegedly selling a collection of NFTs as unregistered securities to the public. The SEC concluded that the NFTs operated as “investment contracts” and were therefore securities under Howey . In both actions, SEC Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda dissented, disagreeing with the SEC’s overbroad classification of the NFTs. They admonished : “The Commission should have grappled with these questions long ago and offered guidance [to the public] when NFTs first started proliferating.”

The SEC’s orders ignored the First Amendment problem that arises when the SEC regulates NFTs involving artworks or creative expression protected by the First Amendment. Both NFT projects subject to the SEC orders involved artistic works: their artworks were embodied in their NFTs, which included pictorial and graphical images (keys depicting various symbols, and numerous cat characters for an animated series, respectively). And both NFT projects had plans to create artistic expression as their business: Impact Theory was developing an online game, and Stoner Cats , an animated web series featuring the cat characters. To require securities registration of artwork NFTs before an artist can distribute them to the public raises a serious First Amendment problem—and most likely constitutes an unlawful prior restraint in violation of the artist’s freedom of expression. A digital Pokémon NFT is just as much protected expression as a physical Pokémon card. Restraining the sale of either until the government approves its publication is a prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment.

Adhering to the original public meaning of “investment contract” avoids this First Amendment problem. Artwork NFTs are not investment contracts because they typically do not entitle, by contract, their holders to share the profits solely generated by the NFT project. Instead, the NFTs typically convey ownership in an embodiment of an artwork. Artwork NFTs are “original collectibles,” as Cassandra Hatton, a senior vice president at Sotheby’s who has overseen the sale of many NFTs, explained in Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Adams’ book, The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy .

And the mere expectation of appreciation in the value of an artwork, whether embodied in NFTs or canvas, doesn’t create an investment contract any more than the appreciation in Barbie dolls, Birkin bags, Nike sneakers, Pokémon cards, Rolex watches, and Picasso paintings. Even if people who invest in these collectibles reasonably expect an appreciation in value—i.e., profits—from their respective makers’ efforts, such as in developing their brands and returning value to their collectors, that speculative expectation of profit doesn’t turn these collectibles into investment contracts. The economic realities of buying collectibles are different in kind from investing in investment contracts. Buying a rare Barbie, even if purchased from Mattel as an NFT expecting it will appreciate, is different from buying a right to a business’s profit. The former lacks the contractual right to profits that the latter has.

A link to the article on SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4819525

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