People

Salma Waheedi is a Lecturer on Law and Executive Director of the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World at Harvard Law School. She is a public interest lawyer and international law expert, with extensive experience in litigation and advocacy before international courts, including the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, and United Nations mechanisms and treaty bodies. She also serves as Legal Advisor on the Middle East and North Africa at the University Network for Human Rights, a Guardrail Advisor at De|Center, and an affiliated faculty member of the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Salma’s work focuses on international accountability, gender, family law reform, refugee rights, technology, and business and human rights. She leads collaborative research and justice advocacy projects, working closely with communities and advocates across the Middle East and North Africa, and advises on questions of human rights and humanitarian law in the contemporary Middle East. At Harvard, she teaches courses on global justice, gender, international law and Israel-Palestine, comparative law of the Middle East, and Islamic law.

Prior to joining Harvard Law School, Salma practiced in the areas of corporate accountability litigation, anticorruption and trade compliance, UN law, and asylum and refugee law, including at Chicago’s United African Organization, Baker McKenzie LLP, the Transnational Development Clinic at Yale Law School, and the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. She was awarded visiting fellowships at Harvard’s Islamic Legal Studies Program and Committee on Middle Eastern Studies. Between 2004-2012, she held senior positions at Bahrain’s Economic Development Board and Ministry of Finance, specializing in international trade, economic and social development, business regulatory reform, and institutional reform; engaged in Middle East policy research and analysis at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center; and served as a business strategy consultant in the energy sector.

Salma holds a JD from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, an MA in Government and International Law from Georgetown University, an MA in International Affairs from American University, and a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. She is admitted to practice law in New York and Washington, D.C.

Selected Publications

• Constructing Checks and Balances: Shari’a, Constitutional Courts, and the Civil State, Journal of Constitutional Law in the Middle East and North Africa (forthcoming 2026).
• Criminal Law in Egypt, Oxford Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (Kevin Jon Heller and Markus D. Dubber eds., forthcoming 2026). Co-author: Sadiq Reza.
• Spotlights on Religions and Regions: Animal Law in Arab States of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law (Anne Peters, Kristen Stilt, and Saskia Stucki eds., forthcoming 2026).
• Justice for Survivors of Gender-Based Violence: Access to Information and Legal Support Network in the Arab Region, UN Women Expert Papers (Sept. 2025).
• Right of Return of the Armenians of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) Under International Law, Aram Manoukian Institute for Strategic Planning (2025). Co-authors: Yeghia Tashjian, Nareg Seferian, and Thomas Becker.
• Guest Editor, Journal of Constitutional Law in the Middle East and North Africa , Issue 3 (2023). Co-editor: Tamara El-Khoury.
• Attempts at Reform: Criminalizing Violence Against Women in Arab Countries, Violence Against Women in Arab Societies: Challenges and Horizons of Change (Amal Hamada ed., 2022). Co-author: Hala Abdelqader.
• Litigating Women’s Rights in Arab Gulf Monarchial Systems, Arab Law Quarterly (Special Issue: Authoritarianism in the Arab World, Nathan Brown & Mai El-Sadany eds., 2022).
• Constitutional Courts in Arab Gulf States, Al-Abhath, American University of Beirut (2022).
• Islamic Shari’a in the Legal Orders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, in Constitutional Review in the Middle East and North Africa (Anja Schoeller-Schletter ed., 2021).
• Guarantees and Challenges of Judicial Independence: The Constitutional Courts of Kuwait and Bahrain as Case Studies, in Constitutional Review in the Middle East and North Africa (Anja Schoeller-Schletter ed., 2021).
• Judicial Review in the Context of Constitutional Islam, in Comparative Judicial Review (Erin F. Delaney & Rosalind Dixon eds., 2018). Co-author: Kristen Stilt.
• The Ambitions of Muslim Family Law Reform, Harvard J. Law & Gender (2018). Co-authors: Kristen Stilt & Swathi Ghandhavadi Griffin.