NYU Professor Intisar Rabb ’06 to Discuss The Burden and Benefit of Doubt in Islamic Law

NYU law professor Intisar A. Rabb ’06, an expert in Islamic legal studies, will deliver the 2012-13 James A. Thomas Lecture on Monday, Feb. 18, 2013, at Yale Law School. The lecture is titled “The Burden and Benefit of Doubt in Islamic Law.” It begins at 4:30 p.m. in the Faculty Lounge and is free and open to the public.

Intisar A. Rabb is an associate professor of Law and of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU. She previously served as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Associate Professor of Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and 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 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 Islamic constitutionalism and contemporary 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. 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.

Rabb received a B.A. from Georgetown University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an M.A. and Ph.D from Princeton University. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.

The James A. Thomas Lecture was established in 1989 in honor of Dean James A. Thomas ’64 and his many years of service to Yale Law School. It brings to the Law School a scholar whose work addresses the concerns of communities or groups currently marginalized within the legal academy or society at large.