Students
Omar Abdel-Ghaffar is a JD-PhD student at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and History Department. His research interests are in late medieval Islamic legal and social history, with a particular interest in courts and conceptions of justice. Before coming to Harvard, he completed his MA at Columbia University and his BA at UCDavis.
Muhammad Hassan Ali is a legal practitioner and writer specializing in constitutional law, fundamental rights, Islamic law, and commercial law. He earned his first law degree from the University of London in 2017 and is currently pursuing an LL.M. from Harvard Law School (Class of 2025). With over seven years of professional experience primarily in litigation, he has clerked for three Justices of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, contributing to several landmark judgments on constitutional law, fundamental rights, and commercial law.
Christine is a 2L from Auckland, New Zealand. She graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi with a degree in economics and worked on research policy and strategy in Abu Dhabi before law school. Her interest in Islamic law and finance began at NYU Abu Dhabi, where she worked on an Islamic finance policy project during an internship. At the law school, Christine is also involved in the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Harvard Law & Policy Review, and Women's Law Association.
Ghada Amer is a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School (Class of 2027). Prior to law school, she worked as a Specialist Legal Analyst in the Claim Monetization and Dilution practice at Kobre & Kim LLP, where she focused on cross-border asset recovery and international judgment enforcement. She holds a B.A. from Harvard College in Government and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Giovanni DiRusso is a 4th-year PhD student in the Committee on the Study of Religion. His research focuses on the intellectual history of Christianity and Islam in the medieval Middle East, and he is currently writing his dissertation on Christian Arabic apocalyptic literature. In addition to his primary research interests, Giovanni uses several machine-learning and computational tools in his study of Arabic and Islam, including OCR/HTR, text alignment, and natural-language processing. Among other tasks at PIL, Giovanni has tested and trained several machine-learning models for Arabic-language legal sources.