Law and Revolution

Nimer Sultany is Senior Lecturer in Public Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He holds an SJD from Harvard Law School; an LL.M. from University of Virginia; an LL.M. from Tel Aviv University; and an LL.B. from the College of Management. He was a recipient of the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship and the Baldy Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at SUNY Buffalo Law School.

• Introduction Part I: Legitimacy 1: Legitimation Crisis 2: Constitutional Legitimation I 3: Constitutional Legitimation II 4: Revolution Part II: Revolution and Legality 5: Legal Continuity 6: Law's Contradictions 7: Popular Sovereignty Part III: Revolution and Constitution 8: Revolutionary Constitution Making 9: Reformist Constitution Making 10: Constituent Power Afterword

Nimer Sultany's Law and Revolution offers a long overdue corrective to a canon of legal theory that gives African and Asian experiences short shrift. It likewise poses a serious challenge to strands of area studies that, for all their claims of superseding orientalism, continue to approach entire regions in the Global South as mere sources of empirical data rather than dynamic sites possessing generative theoretical capacity. But there is much more to this exceedingly important book than introducing legal theorists to the Middle East or bringing legal theory to Middle East studies. Perhaps it could be best characterized as a work of epistemological reversal, utilizing a deep reading of the Arab Spring to critique conceptual orthodoxies.