Book Launch: The Rule of Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran

This event is a two hour book discussion of a volume that former IALS fellow Mirjam Künkler worked on during her time at IALS: The Rule of Law in the Islamic Republic of Iran, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. 

The book is a comprehensive examination of how the legal and justice systems of the Islamic Republic function and have affected socio-political and cultural life in Iran. The chapters contain not only in-depth discussions of the various legal codes themselves but also provide invaluable insights into their application in practice. 

The volume delves, in considerable empirical detail, into the substantive and procedural dimensions of the rule of law and breaks new ground in the socio-legal history of the Islamic Republic. Instead of focusing purely on the formal dimensions of the law, it understands the rule of law as part of the ‘social imaginary’ of modern Iran with roots in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906/7. It thus illuminates the social and political context in which the law operates; be this in the deep contestations in the Iranian parliament over what precisely constitutes Islamization and what does not, the struggles of the legal profession to remain independent and resist attempts at regime incorporation, the debates among legal scholars on the age of criminal responsibility in Islamic law and youth incarceration, the tensions inside the Information Ministry over how the arts should be censored (including film, theatre, music, literature), the attempts of doctors to tackle the opioid addiction crisis together with high HIV infection levels and how the judiciary has responded to these bottom-up initiatives, the role of Islamic medical law in addressing infertility and in vitro fertilisation, or in how human rights and women’s rights NGOs have impacted reforms of Islamic family law, particularly regarding divorce and custody regulations. The book thus gives the reader a contextual and rich understanding of the ideology and practice of the law, and the political struggles and contestations which are mutually constituted with it.  Importantly, it also asks broader questions about what the rule of law means in non-democratic contexts and how comparative research can improve ways of conceptualizing the quality of the rule of law across different areas of the law.

This event is free to attend, but booking is required.