Rabb, who is finishing her final year of graduate studies in the Near Eastern studies department, will receive up to $100,000 over two years from the Carnegie Corporation to complete a project titled “Islamic Law and Legal Change: The Internal Critique.”
Rabb is one of only two of this year’s scholars not currently on the faculty of a university or college. For the fifth straight year, the winning scholars all focus on Islamic studies.
“We are cultivating a diverse scholarly community spanning a range of disciplines with the expectation that their voices will help Americans develop a more complex understanding of Muslim societies here and throughout the world — revealing Islam’s rich diversity,” Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian explained in a statement on the Corporation’s website.
“Only through vibrant dialogue, guided by bold and nuanced scholarship, can we move public thinking into new territory,” he said.
For her Carnegie project, Rabb will “examine how contemporary jurists in countries with Islamic criminal law regimes draw on the classical literature in modern debates about criminal law legislation, implementation, and reform,” she said in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian.
The project will survey judicial practices in “the 27 countries that have incorporated Islamic law into their constitutions or allow for a jurisdiction of Islamic criminal law,” according to a University statement.
In her academic studies, Rabb explained, she focuses on “maxims and policies of criminal law, because this area of law embodies society’s public, moral values.”
“In America, Muslim-majority countries, and elsewhere, criminal law touches on many of the values we hold dear — including human rights and fairness, public safety and rule of law,” she said.
Rabb’s final presentation will be in the form of an internet database to be used by “scholars, legal institutions, nongovernmental organizations and policymakers,” according to the University statement.
In addition to this project, Rabb will write a book intended for “international lawyers, scholars, the media and the public,” the statement said.
“I aim to examine the ‘internal’ critique of Islamic criminal law to gain a better understanding of the types of arguments that resonate with legal and policy stakeholders who insist on internal discourse. It is important to understand these critiques alongside the ‘external’ perspectives of human rights advocates,” Rabb explained.
Currently, Rabb focuses on comparative law in the United States and the Islamic world. “One of my goals in examining the debates about criminal law reform is to uncover some of the practical and ethical considerations that drive law and legal interpretation in each legal system,” she said.
After her graduation in June, Rabb, a graduate of Georgetown and Yale Law School, will assume a faculty position at the Boston College Law School, where she will teach Islamic and comparative law, criminal law and legislation.
Rabb has studied in Egypt, Iran, Morrocco, Senegal and Syria. She also clerked for Judge Thomas Ambro of the third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from 2006 to 2007.
A Whiting Fellow at Princeton, Rabb was also chosen to be a 2009 Hoffman Scholar by the Alumni Association.
She has been a fellow at the Center for Human Values and is also a graduate associate with the Program in Law and Public Affairs.
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