Presidential Professor of Middle Eastern Law and Politics

Chibli Mallat joined the faculty of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law as Professor of Middle Eastern Law and Politics in 2007. He was named Presidential Professor in 2009, and served between 2008 and 2010 as Senior Legal Advisor to the Global Justice Project: Iraq. He also holds the EU Jean Monnet Chair of Law at Saint Joseph's University in Lebanon. He has held research and teaching positions in the US at Princeton University, Yale Law School, the University of Virginia Law School, the Library of Congress, University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) School of Law, in Europe at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of Lyon, and in Lebanon at Saint Joseph's University and the Islamic University.

As a legal practitioner and consultant Professor Mallat has litigated several international criminal law cases, and advises governments, corporations and individuals in Middle Eastern and international law. He was the Daily Star law page editor, and is a frequent op-ed contributor in newspapers ranging from the Nahar (Lebanon) to the New York Times.

Mallat has been active in the human rights world since his days in college. In 1991, he founded with prominent Iraqi and international personalities the International Committee for a Free Iraq to end the dictatorship in Baghdad. Many of the Iraqi members of the Committee have since become leaders in their country, most prominenlty the current president and foreign affairs minister. In October 2004, he started at the United Nations canvassing for an international tribunal after a prominent politician was the target of an assassination in Beirut. The idea gathered speed after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, eventually leading to the establishment Special Tribunal of Lebanon by the Security Council in 2007. In 2005-6, he participated in the Lebanese Cedar Revolution on the streets of Beirut and in the leadership, and was key to articulating its nonviolent character and call for judicial accountability. Mallat ran for the presidency of Lebanon in an unprecedented open campaign focusing on nonviolence and ambitious reform. In 2009, he founded Right to Nonviolence, an international NGO based in the Middle East that promotes nonviolence as means for change, constitutional reform, and judicial accountability. He actively pariticipated with his students in the debate on constitutional revision in Egypt and in Bahrain, and engaged with them and Harvard colleagues on a UN Security Council Resolution that brings Israelis and Palestinians together in nonviolent conviviality rooted in law.

Professor Mallat usually teaches Middle Eastern and European Union laws at the Law School. Mallat’s classes and seminars are structured to encourage students’s active contribution in books or to advance their own publications. In 2007, a Spring class on Iraq at the law school resulted in Iraq: Guide to Law and Policy, published by Kluwer in 2009. A seminar on Law and War taught at Harvard in 2011 and at Utah in 2012 resulted in several articles published by the students, as well as a Reader on Law and War in final stages of preparation. Work on a Casebook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law has engaged several students across the years and is scheduled for completion in 2012. Mallat spent 2011 at Harvard law school as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies. He taught at Yale law school in Fall 2012 as Visiting Professor of Law and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow.

Scholarship Highlights

Books

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Books Edited

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Op Ed/Editorials

Professional Service

Honors & Awards

Additional Scholarly Highlights

Poetry and other literary work

Professional Affiliations