Intisar A. Rabb

Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 Terms

The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Associate Professor of Islamic Legal Studies

Research Interests

• Islamic Law and Legal History
• Islamic and Comparative Constitutionalism
• Criminal Law
• Theories of Legislation and Statutory Interpretation

Education

• Georgetown University B.S. 1999, Government & Arabic
• Princeton University M.A. 2005, Near Eastern Studies
• Yale Law School J.D. 2006
• Princeton University Ph.D. 2009, Islamic Law

Appointments

• Associate Professor of Law and of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, NYU and NYU School of Law
• Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University
• Carnegie Scholar, Carnegie Corporation of New York
• The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Associate Professor of Islamic Legal Studies, 2012

Additional Information

Visiting Associate Professor Rabb will teach the Seminar Advanced Legislation: Theories of Statutory Interpretation, and the course Introduction to Islamic Law in the Fall 2012 term.

Biographical Statement

Intisar A. Rabb is an associate professor of Law and of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the NYU School of Law and the NYU Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department. She previously served as a member of the law faculty at Boston College Law School, where she taught criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and Islamic law. She also served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She was named a 2010 Carnegie Scholar for research on issues of contemporary Islamic law reform through processes of "internal critique" in the Muslim world, and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard for a project designed to add scholarly context to ongoing discussions of Islamic law in new media and policy circles. She has published on Islamic law in historical and modern contexts, and is currently working on a book called The Burden and Benefit of Doubt: Legal Maxims in Islamic Law. She received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.

Representative Publications

• Rabb, Intisar A. ed., Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought (with Michael Cook, Asma Sayeed, and Najam Haider, Palgrave Macmillan forthcoming 2012).
  
• Rabb, Intisar A. "The Islamic Rule of Lenity," 44 Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 1299 (2011).
  
• Rabb, Intisar A. "We the Jurists': Islamic Constitutionalism in Iraq," 10 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 527 (2008).