We invited attendees from the most recent American Society for Legal History's Annual Meeting (ASLH 2025) to report back on panels relevant to Islamic law, and to reflect on the state of the field. Here is what they had to say.
By Omar Abdel-Ghaffar
The Islamic law presence at this year's American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting in Detroit, Michigan was dispersed across a number of panels rather than concentrated in a single thematic cluster. In total, the program included twelve presentations that engaged Islamic legal history across periods, regions, and methodological approaches. Below, I report on those sessions I attended: one of two panels dedicated to Ottoman legal history alongside three additional presentations that touched on medieval and early modern Islamic law. Taken together, these panels highlight both the growing visibility of Islamic legal history at ASLH and the particular value of the conference as a space for sustained engagement across subfields, regions, and historiographical traditions.
On November 13, I co-convened a "Student Research Colloquium" in which graduate students studying a variety of periods and regions met to present and discuss their works in progress. The richness of discussion between Americanist, Europeanist, Asianist, and Islamic legal historians testifies to the fruits of careful exposition of a topic when combined with a sincere effort to understand a distinct legal experiment. During the Colloquium, Athina Pfeiffer (Princeton University) shared part of her dissertation work, "Law's Allure: Notaries and Legal Practices in the Islamicate Mediterranean (10th–13th century)." Pfeiffer's research is informed by her work at Princeton's Geniza Lab, but incorporates sources from beyond the Geniza to form a compelling image of medieval Islamicate legal practices. Her dissertation examines the social role of Mediterranean notaries as intermediaries between litigants, judges, and documentary practices, foregrounding the notary as a key figure in the everyday operation of the law. Despite being the only Islamic legal historian and one of just two medievalists, she sparked a lively discussion on the legal profession and the characters of the legal drama.
On November 14, Professor Lisa Ford (George Washington University) chaired a panel entitled "Indebted to the State: The Affective and Economic Lives of Imperial Belonging." The panel included four Ottomanists who each discussed various aspects of legal belonging in the late Ottoman period. Lale Can's (City College of New York) contribution, "Convicts and Exiles: Crime, Punishment, and Labor in Late Ottoman History," involved an in-depth study of the late Ottoman administrative practice of resettling useful but problematic officials. In true ASLH fashion, one question that sparked continued discussion came from someone not interested in history at all, but rather a modern lawyer, who asked how these Ottoman practices might help us reflect on our own society's obsession with incarceration. Youssef Ben Ismail (Amherst College), in "Autonomous Subjects: Genealogies of Equality and Difference in the Late Ottoman Empire," traced how competing French and Ottoman legal and administrative discourses in Tunisia produced differentiated forms of imperial subjecthood. Nora Barakat's (Stanford University) paper, "Collective Tax Debt, Class Relations and Belonging in the Late Ottoman Empire," drew on cases from Palestine to show how collective fiscal responsibility structured class relations and status in the late Ottoman Levant. Camille Cole (Illinois State University), in "Debt, Loyalty, and 'Good Subjecthood' in Late Ottoman Basra," examined how financial obligation became a measure of loyalty in Basra and Kuwait. Taken together, the papers situated debt not merely as an economic condition but as a legal and affective mechanism through which imperial belonging was defined and contested.
At a later panel on "Legal Records as Artifacts: Considering the Material Turn in Legal History," Pfeiffer presented "Paper Trails and Debt Tales: The Notary's Craft in Medieval Egypt" alongside Tobias Scheunchen's (Yale Law School) "Seals, Witness Attestations, and Illiteracy: Validating Arabic Legal Documents in an Age of Judicial Expansion." Their presentations were bookended by two others, Lilla Attar's study of ancient Greek law and James Barry's study of the first Chief Justice of Newfoundland's proposed penal chart. The ensuing discussion was a fascinating exchange on the relationship between writing and the law: how expectations are inscribed and what inscription does to assertions of right. The issue of the intertemporality of writing, that is, challenges arising from a piece being written at one point in time and then read at another, pervaded the question-and-answer session.
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The ASLH Annual Meeting's ability to interface with others across fields is particularly useful to the student of Islamic law. Historians of non-Islamic periods and regions can better understand what is distinct about their own periods' experiences through understanding—albeit superficially—the debates taking place within Islamic legal history. Likewise, students of Islamic history can better understand what about Islamic legal procedure for example is particularly Islamic, and which practices simply reflect how courtrooms work. As we are increasingly siloed into regions and time periods, ASLH is a rare opportunity for us to encounter other legal historians and to explore what through-lines connect the experience of the law across time and space—and what makes each legal experiment unique.
