Winner of the 2018 ICON-S Book Prize and the 2018 Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship
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 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.
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.
*Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Department of History, University of
Houston, Houston, TX, International Journal of Middle East
Studies*
It is hard to be too effusive in one's praise for this book. It is
groundbreaking for several reasons: first, it removes
constitutional politics in the Arab world from some exotic margin
of constitutional studies and places it in the center of
cutting-edge debates about the relationship of revolution to rule
of law, the rule of law and legitimacy, and constituent power and
constituted power, showing how the Arab experience both enriches
constitutional theory and is enriched by it; second, its
theoretical sophistication is unmatched by any other work in the
field of Arab constitutional politics; and, third, it takes
seriously the contributions of Arab constitutional lawyers
themselves by incorporating their arguments and analysis into the
structure of the book instead of treating them simply as derivative
authors with nothing relevant to contribute to constitutional
theory.
*Mohammad Fadel, Law & Society Review*
... a well-timed and excellent contribution to the subject areas of
constitutional theory and Arab legal studies. It will serve as a
springboard for further systematic and comparative research in the
field for years to come.
*Sara S. Razai, The Legal Agenda*
Law and Revolution by Nimer Sultany will give your brain an
excellent summer workout. ... Seeking to unchain thinking patterns
from social-political change, this is a must read for lawyers and
politicians.
*Kirsty Brimelow, QC, The Times*
Nimer Sultany's book tells us just what we don't want to hear. He
does so by taking a philosophical hammer to a range of central
concepts in constitutional thought and practice ... Sultany tells
us that settled understandings of concepts such as constituent
power, legitimacy, revolution, and legality lie somewhere between
innocent myth and devious distortion ... In a masterful study,
Sultany dissects the theory of each of these ideas before
illustrating how they fail to map onto the complex events in
multiple nations during the Arab Spring. As a specimen of critical
constitutional theory the book is first rate. As a study pulling
the legal curtain back on constitutionally significant events
during the Arab Spring, it is riveting. And as an in-depth book
combining both of these things, it is incontestably in the front
rank of constitutional scholarship.
*Book Award Committee, International Society of Public Law*
This is a magisterial telling of the tale of legal political ideas
in the tragedy of the countries of the Arab Spring. Sultany makes
us see country by country that popular sovereignty,
constitutionalism, constituent power, the rule of law, judicial
independence, and many more, were abstractions that couldn't
deliver what they promised in the way of guidance, normative
judgment, or even clear meaning. For all its sadness, this is a
brilliant account, full of lessons for a next time sure to
come.
*Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School*
This study foregrounds Arab Spring experiences to reconsider
theories on legitimacy, revolution, legality, and constitutionalism
in an examination of the role of law and constitutions. It is a
pleasure to read an account that offers so much
empirically-grounded theoretical insight from experiences in Arab
states by way of correction to, or development of, existing
mainstream scholarship in these areas.
*Lynn Welchman, School of African and Oriental Studies, University
of London*
Drawing on a wide range of political and constitutional thought,
Nimer Sultany uses 'laws deeply ingrained incoherence' as a probe
to destabilize familiar dichotomies-such as reform/revolution and
continuity/disruption-in theorizing about constitutions,
revolutions, and legitimacy. His case studies of Egypt, Tunisia,
and other nations caught up in the Arab Spring confirm his
perspective's contribution to constitutional theory.
*Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School*
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