LSA Graduate Student Paper Prize to Menyawi

The Law and Society Association has awarded the 2015 Graduate Student Paper Prize ("for the graduate paper that best represents outstanding work in law and society research") to Hassan El Menyawi (Ph.D. candidate, New York University) for his legal-historical research on LGB persons in the Muslim world. Here's the citation:

El Menyawi’s paper provides a fascinating historical sociological examination of the legal treatment of LGB persons in the Muslim world. The paper’s historical and empirical scope is remarkable, its analysis of the intersection between colonial legal interventions and branches of Islamic law is repeatedly and creatively insightful, and its underlying data is likely to be of significant interest to other scholars. Deploying a multi-method analysis, El Menyawi demonstrates that Muslim nations were relatively tolerant of homosexuality in the 18th and 19th centuries but are now relatively intolerant. He supports these conclusions with regression analysis of original panel data on 163 countries at 10-year intervals from 1750-2010, together with compelling historical analysis of particular instances of legal change. He finds that polities that are plurality Muslim are today significantly more likely to maintain on the books and to enforce legal prohibitions on consensual same-sex sexual activity, though this was not true in the 18th and 19th centuries, and he traces this “great reversal” to the influence of colonial-era repressive laws. 

 Congratulations to Hassan El Menyawi!

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