Middle East: Law and Practice

MENA Law & Practice 2025 Symposium 

Re/Orient: State Suppression, Neoimperialism, & Imagining Otherwise

Date: Friday, February 21, 2025

Time: 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Organized by: MENALSA at NYU Law

Venue: Greenberg Lounge, Vanderbilt Hall

This year’s symposium is coordinated around three topics which the group decided to be of immediate and contemporary relevance, while continuing our mission of bridging the gaps in normative legal scholarship, practice, and discourse when addressing the peoples, diasporas, and concerns of the MENA region. The event hopes to foster insightful discussions ranging from phenomena such as border violence and free speech to probing legality and notions of social order in the broadest sense, while bringing together professionals, experts, and students with a shared interest in the region. We welcome not only NYU Law students and faculty but the community at large, legal or otherwise, to engage with these conversations, and all interested are invited to share in the contributions of this year’s panelists. 

Agenda Highlights

Session 1 (10:00 AM - 11:45 AM) - Race, Indigeneity, and Border Militarization

W/ Hanaa Hakiki, Brahim El Guabli, Jamie Kessler; Priya Morley moderating

How does border enforcement contemporarily operate in the MENA region and elsewhere? This panel frames conversation with the intent to explore how logics of racial difference interplay with the legal architecture controlling flows of people across border zones such as the Mediterranean Sea, contemporarily known as the world's deadliest migration route. What are the relationships between the modern militarized border regimes, spanning from Morocco to Palestine and elsewhere, and the legacy of settler colonial policies and administrations imposed upon those of the global majority? How do antiblackness and Orientalism interact with the Indigenous histories and politics of the MENA region in service of nation-states and other actors who perpetuate and profit from border violence?

Session 2 (12:00 PM - 1:45 PM) - First Amendment Rights & Freedom of Speech

W/ Sinan Antoon, Veronica Salama, Emerson Sykes; Karin Loevy moderating

Amidst an increasingly hazardous and fraught political climate, what does it mean now to exercise a constitutional right to free speech? This panel will host a range of speakers discussing the past several months of protests, on campuses and elsewhere, and the rapidly evolving domestic debates regarding the repression of political speech. The conversation will blend a policy-oriented discussion with the lived experiences of the speakers to offer a broader perspective on the First Amendment and its current controversies.

Session 3 (2:15 PM - 4:00 PM) - Imagined Alternatives: Beyond Eurocentric Models

W/ Mohamed Abdou, Vasuki Nesiah, Meena Jagannath; moderator pending

This panel brings together lawyers, advocates, and organizers who challenge the limits of legal systems rooted in colonial legacies and explore how movements—whether in the courtroom, in policy spaces, or on the ground—are reimagining law in service of liberation. Instead of treating legal orders as fixed, we ask: What would it mean to work beyond them? How do we build legal and advocacy strategies that refuse to reproduce harm? And what can we learn from practitioners and activists who are already disrupting, resisting, and/or reconstructing legal frameworks for justice?