Dr Nimer Sultany

Dr Nimer Sultany is Reader in Public Law. He holds a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Harvard Law School and was the recipient of the British Academy Fellowship and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at SUNY Buffalo Law School.  

Dr Sultany serves as the chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies and the elected chair of the Academic Assembly. He also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law, a leading journal for critical scholarship on Palestine and international law. Prior to joining SOAS, he practiced human rights law in Palestine, and was the director of the Political Monitoring Project at Mada al-Carmel – The Arab Centre for Applied Social Research. He published extensively on constitutional theory, comparative constitutionalism, and Israeli jurisprudence.  

His book “Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring” (Oxford University Press, 2017, with new introduction 2020) won the 2018 Book Prize awarded by the International Society of Public Law and the 2018 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship awarded by the Society of Legal Scholars.  

Dr Sultany’s academic articles have appeared in leading journals, including the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Buffalo Law Review, Social & Legal Studies, Boston University International Law Journal, and the Journal of Genocide Research. He also published chapters in major edited volumes on constitutional theory and on Law and Marxism.  

His publications include: “Law’s Ideology: Neoliberalism and Developmentalism in Egyptian Jurisprudence”; “The Question of Palestine as a Litmus Test: On Human Rights and Root Causes”; “The State of Progressive Constitutional Theory: The Paradox of Constitutional Democracy and the Project of Political Justification”; “What Good is Abstraction? From Liberal Legitimacy to Social Justice”; “Religion and Comparative Constitutionalism: Lessons from American and Islamic Constitutionalism”; “Against Conceptualism: Islamic Law, Democracy, and Constitutionalism in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring”; and “Activism and Legitimation in Israel’s Jurisprudence of Occupation”.  

Dr Sultany is also a frequent commentator for media outlets, including pieces and appearances in outlets such as The Guardian, Opinio Juris, Middle East Eye, ABC News, Channel 4, BBC, AlJazeera English, LBC, Times Radio and a range of podcasts.  

Public Law; Legal and Political Theory; Comparative Constitutionalism; Public International Law and Human Rights Law.