Asifa Quraishi-Landes

Asifa Quraishi-Landes specializes in comparative Islamic and U.S. constitutional law, with a current focus on modern Islamic constitutional theory.  She is a 2009 Carnegie Scholar and 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. Recent publications include "Legislating Morality and Other Illusions about Islamic Government," (in Locating the Shari'a: Legal Fluidity in Theory, History and Practice, Nathan French & Sohaira Siddiqui editors) and "Healing a Wounded Islamic Constitutionalism: Sharia, Legal Pluralism, and Unlearning the Nation-State Paradigm (in Transformative Constitutionalism, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, editor).  Currently, she is working on a book manuscript tentatively titled "Three Pillars Constitutionalism" in which she proposes a new model of Islamic constitutionalism for today's Muslim-majority countries.

Professor Quraishi-Landes holds a doctorate from Harvard Law School and other degrees from Columbia Law School, the University of California-Davis, and the University of California-Berkeley, and has served as law clerk in the United State Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  She has served as a Public Delegate on the United States Delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and as advisor to the Pew Task Force on Religion & Public Life.  In recent years she has served as:  President of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML), Co-Executive Director of Muslim Advocates, Executive Director of Muslim Public Service Network, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Bayan Islamic Graduate School, and President of Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights.