In our last issue, volume 39, number 2, we focused on politics or power beyond the domain of the state to examine the constitution of intimacy in the face of state violence, formations of historical memory amid mass displacement, and the regulatory apparatus of family law.
In this issue, we continue to explore the relationships among law, family, and religion by investigating gender-based custody in Islamic jurisprudence. Following on the discussions that the Kitabkhana put forth in our August 2019 issue on Beshara Doumani's Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History, Jean-Michel Landry's ethnographic research on Shi'i and Sunni family courts in Lebanon draws attention to the role of the secular state in facilitating practices of sectarian difference and distinction and in limiting progressive jurisprudential practice.
Next we turn to the intersection of legal studies and economics in a set of essays that examine the concept of...
