People

Mina E. Khalil is a legal and social historian of the modern Middle East. Prior to joining PLS, he was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at NYU School of Law from 2019-2020.  His Ph.D. dissertation entitled “A Society’s Crucible: Recasting the Criminal Defendant in Modern Egypt, 1820-1920” explores the history of the criminal defendant in modern Egypt and the attendant transformations that took place within Islamic law and society. In it, he attempts to piece together the changes in nineteenth-century Egyptian law and society that impacted the criminal defendant—from new prosecutorial powers to new crimes to new methods of proving guilt that also reconfigured the presumption of innocence to new notions of equality before the criminal law. He paints this unique portrait of the criminal defendant drawing from intensive research he conducted in various archives, including the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya), the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the British National Archives, and Le Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes. He has published in the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law and has taught Islamic and comparative constitutional law in the Law Department at the American University in Cairo from 2012 to 2013. He has been named a 2020 Dean’s Scholar (University of Pennsylvania), and has received a number of academic fellowships, including the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) Fellowship (2018-2019) and Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Ottoman Turkish. He holds a B.A. from Stanford University (2006) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (2011).  He expects to complete his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.