• Structure, jurisdiction, and identity
• Cultural images and the substance of law
• Case law and the reflection of identity
• Legislation and the representation of identity
• Legal education and the formation of identity
• Crafting law to fit identity
• Limiting identity in law
• Arab lawyers and French identity
• Arif al-Arif and nomadic identity.

One of the major questions facing the world today is the role of law in shaping identity and in balancing tradition with modernity. In an arid corner of the Mediterranean region in the first decades of the twentieth century, Mandate Palestine was confronting these very issues. Assaf Likhovski examines the legal history of Palestine, showing how law and identity interacted in a complex colonial society in which British rulers and Jewish and Arab subjects lived together. Law in Mandate Palestine was not merely an instrument of power or a method of solving individual disputes, says Likhovski. It was also a way of answering the question, ""Who are we?"" British officials, Jewish lawyers, and Arab scholars all turned to the law in their search for their identities, and all used it to create and disseminate a hybrid culture in which Western and non-Western norms existed simultaneously. Uncovering a rich arsenal of legal distinctions, notions, and doctrines used by lawyers to mediate between different identities, Likhovski provides a comprehensive account of the relationship between law and identity. His analysis suggests a new approach to both the legal history of Mandate Palestine and colonial societies in general.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Entering a sociolegal arena
• Historical settings
• Family and court
• Presenting claims
• The court arena
• Documenting the family
• Negotiating versions
• Gender and family
• Attorneys and the justice of the qadi
• Reshaping solutions
• Family experiences
• Conclusion: family, court, and modernity.

This book challenges prevailing assumptions about family, courts of law, and the nature of modernity in Muslim societies against the backdrop of Haifa and Jaffa during "the long nineteenth century". The popular image of the family and the court of law in Muslim societies is one of traditional, unchanging social frameworks. Iris Agmon suggests an entirely different view, grounded in a detailed study of nineteenth-century Ottoman court records from the flourishing Palestinian port cities of Haifa and Jaffa. She depicts the Sharia Muslim court of law as a dynamic institution, capable of adapting to rapid and profound social changes - indeed, of playing an active role in generating these changes. Court and family interact and transform themselves, each other, and the society of which they form part. Agmon's book is a significant contribution to scholarship on both family history and legal culture in the social history of the Middle East.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)