Courting The Law

One of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of Islamic law is the Qur’anic provision concerning witnesses in financial transactions. It is often presented as evidence that Islam considers a woman’s testimony to be worth “half” that of a man. In reality, the sweeping claim that “a woman’s testimony is worth half of a m...

The governance of international watercourses has long been constrained by the tension between the shared physical reality of a transboundary river and the traditional insistence on exclusive territorial sovereignty. The community of interest principle resolves that tension by conceiving of a w...

More than 286 international river basins and hundreds of shared aquifers span national borders. Nearly half of the world’s population depends on cooperative transboundary water management to ensure access to safe water, food security, and ecological wellbeing. Yet the legal architecture suppor...

Sunny Masih stood outside a Lahore court for weeks, waiting for someone to tell him why his brother had died. Amir Masih, a gardener, had been picked up over an alleged street crime and taken, his family says, to a private lock-up rather than a police station. He was never produced before a magistrate. The post-mortem later showed broken ribs and bruising across his hands, fe...

Pakistan does not suffer from a shortage of constitutional debate. It suffers from a shortage of constitutional consistency.

Every constitutional generation eventually confronts the same question: is the Constitution a permanent framework for governing everyone, or merely another instrument for defeating political opponents? The answer to that question determines wh...