INDIANA

A lecture and discussion with Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi (University of Pittsburgh School of Law) about his book: “Negotiating in Civil Conflict: Constitutional Construction and Imperfect Bargaining in Iraq”

When: Thursday, February 26 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Where: Maurer School of Law, Room 213

What: Haider Ala Hamoudi served in 2009 as an adviser to Iraq’s Constitutional Review Committee, and he argues that the terms of the Iraqi Constitution are sufficiently capacious to be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing it to appeal to the country’s three main s

ects despite their deep disagreements. While some say that this ambiguity avoids the challenging compromises that ultimately must be made if the state is to survive, Hamoudi maintains that to force these compromises on issues of central importance to ethnic and sectarian identity would almost certainly result in the imposition of one group’s views on the others. Drawing on the original negotiating documents, he shows that this feature of the Constitution was not an act of evasion, as is sometimes thought, but a mark of its drafters’ awareness in recognizing the need to permit the groups the time necessary to develop their own methods of working with one another over time.

*Co-sponsored with Center for Constitutional Democracy