SOAS School of Law Research Newsletter Issue 11, April—October 2016 Research News from Staff and Students Contents The School of Law congratulates three of our students who have Research News 1-2 recently completed their PhDs, and also congratulates their supervi- New Staff Research Profiles 3 sors. Vishal Vora’s thesis on ‘The Islamic Marriage Conundrum: Reg- ister or Recognise? The Legal Consequences of the Nikah in England Peter Muchlinski: A Few Words 4-5 and Wales’ was passed in September. His supervisors were Martin Workshop on Indonesian Mi- 5 Lau and Peter Muchlinski. Sham Arun-Qayyum was also awarded grant Workers his PhD on the topic of ‘People, not Societies, are Multicultural: An Interdisciplinary Study Examining how Muslims in Britain are Negoti- New PhD Students 6 ating Overlapping (Legal) Norms, Identities and Traditions’. His PhD was supervised by Werner Menski. Virginie Rouas passed her viva Towards an Academic Ora et 7-8 without any corrections. Her topic was ‘Comparative Analysis of Hu- Labora man Rights Litigation against Multinationals in France and the Neth- erlands’. Virginie was supervised by Peter Muchlinski and Nick Fos- Research Centre Activities 8 ter. Noryati Haji Ibrahim, supervised by Ian Edge, was awarded her Studying Law and Constitutions 9 doctorate on ‘Divorce Related Issues: A Study of Financial Settle- ment under Muslim Family Law in Brunei’. Upcoming Research Events 10 Two of our staff members, Dr Vanja Hamzić and Dr Nimer Sultany, New Publications 11-12 have recently been awarded prestigious research fellowships. Dr Vanja Hamzić was awarded an annual Membership at the School Conference Presentations 13-15 of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, for the academic year 2016-17. This honour comes with a US$50,000 grant given to SOAS to cover one year of Dr Hamzić’s teaching and administrative duties (see pages 7-8 for more details of Dr Hamzić’s experiences at Princeton). Dr Nimer Sultany was awarded a British Academy Mid- Career Fellowship of almost £100,000 and will spend the 2016-2017 year pursuing a research project on ‘Revolution, Constitutionalism and Religion after the Arab Spring’ (see page 9 for details of this project). Both Dr Hamzić and Dr Sultany have also been promoted to Senior Lecturer in the SOAS School of Law. ‘The Gendered Imaginaries of Crisis in International Law,’ agora organised by Emily Jones, Dr Gina Heathcote and colleagues at the European Society for International Law (ESIL) Annual Conference, Riga, Latvia, 9 September 2016 (see page 2). 1 Research News (continued) Other staff members have also held visiting positions recently. Dr Kate Grady was a Visiting Scholar at the Asia Pa- cific Centre for Military Law, School of Law, University of Melbourne, during September and October 2016. Dr Petra Mahy was a visiting researcher at the Department of Business Law and Taxation, Monash University, Australia, throughout July 2016. Petra has also had her Associate Fellowship at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, extended for another year. In publishing news, Dr Catherine Jenkins and Dr Lutz Oette have taken over as Co-General Editors of the Journal of African Law. Dr Vanja Hamzić launched his new book Sexual and Gender Diversity in the Muslim World: History, Law and Vernacular Knowledge (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016; Islamic South Asia series) at the Law and Society Associa- tion’s annual conference in New Orleans, on 2 June 2016. The book was also previously launched at the University in Melbourne, on 14 December 2015, and at SOAS on 9 March 2016. Professor Fareda Banda was featured in the Leverhulme Trust’s 2015 Annual Review. The Trust celebrated the 20th anniversary of the launch of its early career research fellowships by catching up with 10 people who have benefitted from the scheme. Fareda was one of the 10 people featured in the ‘what happened next’ section. Fareda also recently helped the World Bank Gender team with their questionnaire for the next Women, Business and Law report. Over the past six months, our staff and students have been involved in a number of thought-provoking research events, of which just a few are mentioned here. On 26 August 2016, Dr Yoriko Otomo organised a workshop on ‘Contract Law: New Directions’ with contract law scholars from across the UK meeting to discuss their research and a variety of contract law teaching issues (see photograph below). The workshop resulted in changes to teaching, the creation of an online archive of shared material, and agreement on a follow-up workshop in a year's time. Dr Otomo also co-organised an event on ‘Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food’ at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, on 27-28 May 2016, which was attended by the world’s lead- ing scholars on human and animal milk. Dr Gina Heathcote and Emily Jones, together with Dr Bérénice Schramm (SOAS Centre for Gender Studies), Dr Troy Lavers and Dr Loveday Hodson (University of Leicester) organised an ag- ora entitled ‘The Gendered Imaginaries of Crisis in International Law’ at the European Society of International Law (ESIL) annual conference on 9 September 2016 (see photograph on page 1). Finally, Professor Diamond Ashiagbor organised a two-day workshop on ‘Reimagining Labour Law for Development: Informal Work in the Global North and the Global South’ on 15-16 September. This was the Society for Legal Scholars Annual Seminar for 2016, and it was well-attended by a number of leading labour law and development scholars from around the world. ‘Contract Law: New Directions’, workshop organised by Dr Yoriko Otomo at SOAS on 26 August 2016 2 New Staff Research Profiles Dr Kanika Sharma has joined SOAS as a half-time Senior Teaching Fellow. She obtained her PhD in Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2016. She came to law through an interdisciplinary route involving degrees in journalism, politi- cal studies, and conflict transformation and peace building. Her interest in law was sparked through an examination of historic political trials in India, and she submitted an MPhil thesis on the Gandhi Murder Trial at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. In her research, Kanika uses postcolonial and constitutional theories to exam- ine the use of images and architecture by law. As part of this research, she has organ- ised two Law and Image symposiums at Birkbeck – Law and Image: Picturing a Theory (2015) and Law and Image II: Representing the Limits of the Nation State (2016). Her work on the use of architecture and images in political trials has been published as ‘Spectacular Justice: Aesthetics and Power in the Gandhi Murder Trial’ in Awol Allo (ed.), The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance (Ashgate 2015). Kanika’s research also uses theories of psychoanalytic jurisprudence, and she is particularly interested in the relation between law and culture and the formation of the legal subject in coloni- al and post-colonial contexts. She disputes the central position accorded to the father-as-lawmaker by traditional Western psychoanalysis, and instead seeks to recover the role of the maternal figure, especially the figure of the mother-as-nation, in establishing legal subjectivity. A piece based on her PhD is due to be published in 2017, titled ‘Mother India: The Role of the Maternal Figure in establishing Legal Subjectivity' in Law and Critique. Since finish- ing her PhD, Kanika is currently working on a feminist critique of Indian equity and Hindu family trust laws. Dr Muin Boase has also joined SOAS School of Law as a half-time Senior Teaching Fellow. Since 2015, he has co-convened, a course on ‘International Law: Contemporary Issues’ for the SOAS summer school with Dr Gina Heathcote. He teaches and lectures on the International Protection of Human Rights and teaches ECHR/EU law. He previously taught ‘Public International Law with Special Reference to Asia and Africa’ and convened seminars for the course ‘International Law and Global Orders’. Muin spent the past two and a half years (2014-2016) working in international commercial arbitration as a Research Assistant to Sir Bernard Rix of 20 Essex Street. He is formally appointed as a Tribunal Secretary in an LCIA arbitration concerning a matter of contract interpretation in an ener- gy dispute. He has also carried out research for a number of other cases before the English courts involving state immunity, diplomatic immunity and human rights law; an ICSID arbitration as well an UNCITRAL arbitration before the PCA. Muin completed a doctorate in International Law at SOAS (2014) under the supervision of Professor Matthew Craven, which he is currently preparing for publication. This tells a critical history of the birth of interna- tional investment law, which compares the regime of ‘extraterritoriality’ in the 19th century with the development of international investment law during the period of decolonisation. Muin’s main research interests include: inter- national legal history, foreign investment law, the law of treaties, state immunity and human rights law. Emily Jones has just been appointed as a fractional Senior Teaching Fellow lecturing on the Law of Torts. Emily has been a GTA at SOAS for the past three years where she has taught Foundations of International Law, International Pro- tection of Human Rights and Law of Property, amongst other subjects. Emily was formerly a Visiting Researcher in the School of Law at Sciences Po, Paris. She has previously worked for various women’s rights NGOs on both a domestic and inter- national level and is currently doing her PhD in the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS. Emily’s work aims to push at the boundaries/limits of feminist approaches to international law and international law’s structural biases by applying French- inspired feminist philosophy, psychoanalysis and feminist posthumanism.