Haider Ala Hamoudi

Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi serves as the Interim Dean of the Law School. He previously served as Vice Dean, a position he took on July 1, 2018, following his promotion from the position of Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. From 2013 to 2017, he was the Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development. As Interim Dean, Hamoudi is a critical member of the leadership team. His responsibilities include management and long term planning of the Law School curriculum, supervision of adjunct faculty, member of the leadership team drafting a strategic plan for the Law School, supervision of the budget planning process, including annual sessions with stakeholders to identify budget priorities, and primary representative of the Law School.

Professor Hamoudi is also the Editor in Chief of the Arab Law Quarterly, a position he has held since September 1, 2018.  He was retained by Brill, the publisher of the Quarterly, in order to to revitalize and restore its scholarly reputation of Quarterly­ as the most highly regarded and widely distributed law journal addressing matters of Arab law in the English language. To this end, Professor Hamoudi has led an effort to replace entirely the peer review process, establish special symposium issues, recompose the Board of Editors, and engage in an aggressive digital marketing campaign to redefine the image of the Quarterly within the relevant scholarly community.

Professor Hamoudi’s scholarship focuses on Middle Eastern and Islamic Law. As concerns Islamic law, and specifically Islamic finance, where he has done much of his writing, his approach has been to focus on the manner in which modern legal actors, with their own preexisting political, social, economic and ideological dispositions, interpret and apply Islamic law as part of the positive law of contemporary states. In addition to his numerous articles and book chapters in a wide variety of law school journals, university presses and other scholarly venues, as a result of which he has become internationally recognized as a leading scholar in the field, he has coauthored a casebook on Islamic Law entitled Islamic Law in Modern Courts, and a Nutshell on Islamic Law with West Publishing.

As with his Islamic Law work generally, Professor Hamoudi’s scholarship in the law of the Middle East focusses on the law as it operates in the field rather than as it exists in texts and commentaries. Professor Hamoudi spent most of 2009 in Baghdad advising the Constitutional Review Committee of the Iraqi legislature, responsible for developing critical amendments to the Iraq Constitution deemed necessary for Iraqi national reconciliation, on behalf of the United States Embassy in Baghdad. He also advised on other key pieces of legislation, including a hydrocarbons law, a revenue management law, and an antitrust law. From this work, and from extensive contemporaneous research into the records and legislative history of the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution in 2005, Professor Hamoudi published a book with the University of Chicago Press in 2013 entitled Negotiating in Civil Conflict: Imperfect Bargaining and Constitutional Construction in Iraq.

Professor Hamoudi’s most recent work looks at the three primary forms of legal order in the Iraqi nation-state—tribal law, Islamic law and state law—and attempts to explain how they interact with one another to organize commercial and other private law activity throughout the state. As with his earlier work, Professor Hamoudi seeks to demonstrate that the actual operation of law, including Islamic law, is far more complex and interesting than any examination of authoritative legal texts would lead one to believe.

Professor Hamoudi received his B.Sc. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. He was both a member of the Physics Honor Society, Sigma Pi Sigma, and a Burchard Scholar for Excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 1996, Professor Hamoudi received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. After graduating, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Constance Baker Motley in the Southern District of New York and then worked as an Associate at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton until 2003. In 2003 and 2004, Professor Hamoudi served as a legal advisor to the Finance Committee of the Iraq Governing Council, as well as a Program Manager for a project managed by the International Human Rights Law Institute of DePaul University School of Law to improve legal education in Iraq. He joined the University of Pittsburgh School of Law as an Assistant Professor in 2007.