Two very different but equally unmissable guests next week at the University of Padua: Nick Foster (former Senior lecturer at SOAS, UCL) and Prof. Joseph (Giuseppe) Brincat (University of Malta). Not to mention the presentation of Davide Basaldella’s book. Anyone interested is more than welcome!
Nick Foster will first give a lecture entitled “A Different Legal History: A Snapshot of Islamic Law, Past and Present” within the framework of Stefania Gialdroni’s course in Legal history on October 21st at 4:30pm, at the University of Padova, Palazzo del Bo (Room E, ground floor).
On October 22nd at 10:00 he will then give a lecture thought specifically for the research group of MICOLL entitled “Rationality, Emotion and Myth in the Dynamics of Historical Scholarship: Examples from Islamic Commercial Law and the Lex Mercatoria” in the “Sala delle Riviste”, 3rd floor of the Palazzo del BO, University of Padova.
Nicholas (Nick) HD Foster studied Latin, Ancient Greek, French and Russian at school, then law, French and Arabic in Cambridge and French law in Aix-en-Provence.
He initially worked in commercial legal practice, then set up and ran a bespoke tailoring business with his wife, after which he lectured for 25 years at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS), where he taught a wide range of subjects, received the Director’s Teaching Prize in 2006 and was Co-Director of the Centre of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law (CIMEL) 2004-2007.
He was a solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales from 1985 to 2010 (non-practising, i.e. not holding a practising certificate, from 2008 to 2010).
Nick has published extensively on, inter alia, Islamic commercial law and comparative law. In 2016 and 2017, he and Haider Ala Hamoudi produced a report and a supplementary report for the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Commerce and Industry on the distinction between commercial and non-commercial law in the context of the reform of the Saudi Arabian legal system, and in 2023 he produced a report for SOAS on the new regime for education and training in England and Wales.
Nick is presently an independent scholar and a director and the secretary of The Association for Comparative Legal Studies Limited, the company which owns the
Journal of Comparative Law and the
JCL Studies in Comparative Law book series.
