Known For: Legal scholar
Country: United States

About

Havva G. Guney-Ruebenacker is a doctor of juridical science candidate at Harvard Law School.  Her dissertation is a comparative study of the different theories of legal change in Islamic and Western jurisprudence and a review of the nineteenth century codification and legal reform movements in the Islamic world with a special focus on the area of family law and women’s rights as well as the intellectual background and impact of the first modern Islamic family code, the 1917 family code. 

Born in Turkey, Havva studied Islamic law and sciences at the Madrasat Tahfiz al Quran al Karim, a special Quranic studies high school in Mecca.  She received high honors upon graduating and a number of awards in several regional Quranic recitation and memorization competitions in Saudi Arabia and Iran. She received her BA in law from the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Tehran where she gained a comparative knowledge of Islamic law through her study of the Shi’a school, and she received her LLM in European Law from University of Cambridge where she studied European Union Law and European legal history.  Havva worked as a graduate fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies of the University of Oxford conducting research on the Ottoman Mecelle, the first Islamic Civil Code.  She worked as a researcher at various human rights institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights and the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva where she wrote two chapters on the situation of the judiciary in Turkey and Iran for the annual publication, Attacks on Justice.  Havva is fluent in Turkish, Arabic, Persian and English.