Nahed Samour, Early Career Fellow, Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study
The talk focuses on the judge’s authority as it emanated from the judicial organization under the early Abbasids. It discusses the concept of office as well as theories of professionalization and bureaucratization and their applicability to the Islamic history of adjudication.

Dr. Nahed Samour is an Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study, Germany and pursues her Habilitation at the Humboldt University, Berlin, Faculty of Law. She has studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard, Damascus and was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a post doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland. She was also Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School’s Institute of Global Law and Policy’s 2015 Workshop. Among her writings on early Islamic courts is “A Critique of Adjudication: Formative Moments in Early Islamic Legal History”, Intisar A. Rabb and Abigail Krasner Balbale (eds.) Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Islamic Legal Studies; Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 44-66.