[We have the following announcement from our friends at Tel Aviv University.]
Tel Aviv Law is pleased to announce that legal historian Lena Salaymeh has joined our faculty. A long-time and active member of ASLH, Salaymeh's innovative scholarship engages the intersections between Islamic and Jewish legal history. In addition, she writes about the complexities of Islamic law in the contemporary world and about the politics of knowledge production in Islamic studies.
Salaymeh's recently completed book, Islamic Legal Beginnings, is a critical analysis of Islamic legal history that uncovers the beginnings of Islamic law and challenges conventional assumptions in Islamic legal historiography. A prolific scholar, her previous publications include pieces in Law and History Review, Journal of Legal Education, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, The Immanent Frame, and Jadaliyya. Her article, "Every law tells a story," recently published in the "Law As..." II symposium issue of UC Irvine Law Review, traces parallel modifications in wife-initiated divorce in Jewish and Islamic legal traditions from late antiquity through the medieval era. Her forthcoming publications include works on juvenile justice in Islamic law and political lawyering in contemporary North Africa.
Salaymeh joins Tel Aviv Law from the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she was Robbins Postdoctoral Fellow and continues to serve as Affiliated Research Fellow for the Robbins Mediterranean Law Project. She earned her PhD in Legal and Middle Eastern History from UC Berkeley and her JD from Harvard Law School, where she co-founded the online journal Unbound. A member of the California bar, she has experience in international and public interest law.
At Tel Aviv Law, Salaymeh will teach Islamic law, Jewish law, legal history, and law and religion. She will be co-directing Tel Aviv Law's Workshop for Legal History in Spring 2015; legal historians who will be in Tel Aviv and would like to attend the workshop should contact her directly.
