–Richard Albert, Boston College Law School
In this latest installment of our video interview series at I-CONnect, I interview Haider Ala Hamoudi on the Iraqi Constitution. I conducted the interview from the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, where I am serving as a visiting scholar for the month of July. My thanks to the Faculty for hosting me, and also to Jena McGill for allowing me to use her office during my stay.
In the interview, we discuss the design of the Iraqi Constitution, the forms and uses of “deferral” as a strategy in designing the Iraqi Constitution, examples of where the strategy of deferral has borne fruit and where it has not, whether the Constitution has proven successful, and we also discuss the prognosis for the country now.
Haider Ala Hamoudi is an Associate Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Development at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is the author of Negotiating in Civil Conflict: Constitutional Construction and Imperfect Bargaining in Iraq. He served as an advisor in Baghdad in 2009 to the Constitutional Review Committee of the Iraqi legislature and as a legal advisor to the Finance Committee of the Iraq Governing Council in 2003-04. An award-winning teacher and scholar, he has won the Robert T. Harper Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as the Hessel Yntema prize, awarded by the American Society of Comparative Law for the best article on comparative law published by an author under the age of 40. Haider Ala Hamoudi holds degrees from MIT (B.Sc.) and Columbia University (J.D., J.S.D.).
He has recently uploaded a new paper on SSRN on “The Political Codification of Islamic Law: A Closer Look at the Draft Shi’i Personal Status Code of Iraq.”
The entire interview runs for 24 minutes, and is available here.
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