Pakistani scholar appointed as visiting professor at Harvard

LAHORE: Dr. Osama Siddique has been appointed as the inaugural Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Harvard Law School. The new Chair has been set up to honor Henry J. Steiner who is currently Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, the Founding Director of the Harvard Human Rights Program and one of the leadings global scholars in the field of human rights.

The chair is open to non-US scholars, judges and advocates with distinctive work in the area. The appointment is only by invitation and it is a matter of great prestige that the very first appointee to this position is a Pakistani.

Dr. Osama Siddique is a graduate of Government College, Lahore and LUMS, studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford for his first law degree, and obtained masters and doctoral degrees from Harvard Law School. He has worked as a Wall Street lawyer as well as an advocate in the Pakistani appellate courts, was cardinally involved in setting up and served as the founding chair of an innovative law program at LUMS where he also taught for many years, and is the author of many academically ranked and peer reviewed scholarly publications.

He is the author of the book “The Jurisprudence of Dissolutions: Presidential Power to Dissolve Assemblies under the Pakistani Constitution and its Discontents” (2008). His latest book, published in June, 2013 by the Cambridge University Press, is titled “Pakistan’s Experience with Formal Law: An Alien Justice.”, makes a seminal contribution to existing literature on the historical and sociological evolution of formal legal systems in post-colonial developing countries (with a particular focus on Pakistan and India), the varied experience of ordinary citizens with these formal legal systems, and the experience and impact of major reform projects. It was declared the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Karachi Literature Festival, 2014 and also awarded the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) Annual Book Prize 2014-2015.

Dr. Siddique is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS), the Executive Director of the Law and Policy Research Network (www.lprn.org.pk), the Chief Executive of Avante Development Services (ADS), and Senior Faculty for the Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy’s (IGLP) Annual Colloquia and Workshops.?