Law and Revolution

Taking the Arab Spring as its case study, this book explores the role of law and constitutions during societal upheavals, and critically evaluates the different trajectories they could follow in a revolutionary setting. It urges a rethinking of major categories in political, legal, and constitutional theory in light of the Arab Spring. The book is a novel and comprehensive examination of the constitutional order that preceded and followed the Arab Spring in Egypt,Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Algeria, Oman, and Bahrain. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including an in-depth analysis of recent court rulings in several Arab countries, the book illustrates the contradictory roles of law and constitutions. The book also contrasts the Arab Spring withother revolutionary situations and demonstrates how the Arab Spring provides a laboratory for examining scholarly ideas about revolutions, legitimacy, legality, continuity, popular sovereignty, and constituent power.With a new preface from the author addressing developments in the Arab Spring.

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., 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., ... 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., 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., 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.

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.