About

Clark Lombardi is the Dan Fenno Henderson Professor of East Asian Legal Studies and the Director of Islamic Legal Studies at the UW School of Law. He joined the UW law school faculty in 2004 and specializes in Islamic law and constitutional law. His teaching areas include comparative law, federalism, and development law. His current research and writing focus on the evolution of Islamic law in contemporary legal systems, comparative judicial institutions, and how constitutional systems address religious organizations and religious law. Lombardi holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University, where he concentrated on Islamic law, and earned his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a James Kent Scholar and editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. He has practiced law at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, and clerked for Judge Samuel A. Alito on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Lombardi has lived, worked, or studied in Indonesia, Yemen, Egypt, and Afghanistan, and has taught courses on Islamic law at Columbia Law School and NYU. His work has involved advising on constitutional and legal reform in the Muslim world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Recognized as a Carnegie Scholar from 2006-2008, his scholarship includes numerous publications on Islamic law, constitutional law, and related fields.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Physics
• Philosophy
• Mathematics
• Law and economics
• Theology

Selected publications

• Islam and Constitutional Law: Insights for the Emerging Field of Buddhist Constitutional Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Constitution-Making for Divided Societies: Afghanistan

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This chapter begins by surveying the current literature on constitutional design constitutions for divided societies and constitutional approaches to power sharing. It pays particular attention to the view that constitutions are best understood not as contracts, but rather as coordination devices. An implication of this view for constitutional design is that, in deeply divided societies, successful coordination (and thus successful constitution-writing) may be easier to achieve if the constitution deliberately leaves certain divisive constitutional questions unresolved, with the understanding that those questions will be resolved incrementally over time. Against this theoretical background, the chapter uses the history and constitutional history of Afghanistan to illuminate the challenges of developing a constitution that can coordinate politics in a deeply divided society, and it evaluates the pros and cons of different approaches to constitutional design in such contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Islam and Constitutional Law

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  This chapter connects the study of Islam and constitutional law with the nascent material on Buddhism. First, it notes the surprisingly long delay in commencing a study of the relationship between Islam and constitutional law, and upon the political and academic developments that eventually inspired the academy to focus its energies productively onto studies in this area. Second, it discusses some of the central findings produced by scholars of this field over the past twenty-five years, focusing on the Sunni world. Third, this chapter will very cautiously draw upon the contributions in this volume to highlight some ways in which patterns found in the Sunni Muslim world seem to be absent in a number of Buddhist countries. The overlaps and contrasts between these two religious traditions and their approaches to constitutional law provide many opportunities for deeper engagement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Series Editors’ Preface

  2019-05-20

  book-chapter

  Extract The Oxford Islamic Legal Studies Series is pleased to include Aria Nakissa's The Anthropology of Islamic Law among its lauded list of monographs. Nakissa's monograph is an important study that blends two distinct disciplinary approaches to the study of Islam. Historically, the study of Islam and Islamic law (especially in North America) has been framed by the poles of philology on the one hand, and anthropology on the other. The former informs the curriculum of long-standing area studies programs, whereas the latter has increasingly informed the curriculum, training, and production of knowledge in religious studies departments. The two disciplinary vantage points present distinct orientations and starting points in the study of Islam and Islamic law. Nakissa's study is an attempt to bring the two approaches together. Through a close study of Islamic law as taught in the seminary classroom, Nakissa not only illuminates a specific environment of teaching, training, and knowledge transmission, but also interrogates the disciplinary formation of Islamic legal studies as a subfield of study and research. He blends a rich and deliberate ethnographic account of seminary training in al-Azhar, a major Sunni institution of learning, with close readings of the texts taught in those classrooms. His ethnographic account integrates the texts from which al-Azhar's instructors teach. By locating his ethnography in the classroom, Nakissa brings together ethnography with text-based analysis to perform a composite study that, by this very characteristic, makes his study an important contribution to advanced research on Islamic legal studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Transformations in Muslim Views about “Forbidding Wrong”:

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2018-01-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Electronic Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law (EJIMEL)

  2018-01-01 · 6 citations

  article
  Publisher

• Islamic Constitutionalism Beyond Liberalism

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2017-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Myanmar’s Muslims, What Do We Now Know?

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016-06-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter offers a reflection on the volume and on the conference that was held in January 2014. It begins with an important review of the work of Moshe Yegar, the author of ‘The Muslims of Burma’, the sole monograph in this area of research to date. The chapter identifies some of the reasons for the lack of research in this area, and then considers the recent new insights that have been offered. It concludes with suggestions of areas for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: Constitutional Politics in the Middle East, with special reference to Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, edited by Saïd Amir Arjomand

  Islamic Law and Society · 2015-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Electronic Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law (EJIMEL) "Annual Volume"

  Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) · 2014-05-08

  articleOpen access
  OA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• D. J. Galligan

  5 shared

• Nathan J. Brown

  5 shared

• R. Michael Feener

  4 shared

• James K. Wellman

  4 shared

• Andrea Büchler

  University of Zurich

  2 shared

• Nadia Sonneveld

  Hague Institute for Global Justice

  2 shared

• Nadjma Yassari

  2 shared

• Gianluca Parolin

  2 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Princeton University

  1990

• M.A.

  Columbia University

  1995

• Other

  Columbia University

  1998

• Ph.D.

  Columbia University

  2001

Awards & honors

• Carnegie Scholar for 2006-08