It is with great pleasure that we announce that Nick Foster will be in Padua for the second time to give a lecture entitled “Another Legal History: An Overview of Islamic Law, its Past and its Present” within the framework of Stefania Gialdroni’s course in Legal history on October 15th at 4:30pm, at the University of Padova, Palazzo del Bo (Room E, ground floor).
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.
He had the initial idea for the Journal of Comparative Law and was its initial principal co-editor.
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.
