Nafay Choudhury is a PhD candidate in Law at King’s College London. His research was awarded the Simon Roberts Award by the Modern Law Review for the best thesis proposal on legal ethnography and legal anthropology, as well as full funding from the Canadian government (SSHRC Doctoral Scholar). Nafay’s areas of research include legal anthropology, sociology of law, rule of law, legal development, Islamic law, and legal pluralism. He is currently a residential Research Fellow at the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies researching on electoral reforms. Nafay was previously Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Afghanistan, which he joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Afghanistan Legal Education Project at Stanford Law School. He helped to establish the country’s first English-medium law program, which included designing the curriculum, and taught courses in contract law, torts, comparative law, traditional justice, and private international law.
Nafay has published articles on legal pluralism in Afghanistan in the Asian Journal of Law & Society and the Suffolk Transnational Law Review, and on Afghan madrasas in Religion, State & Society. During his tenure as Visiting Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, he authored an article on the effects of globalization on Afghan taxi drivers, forthcoming in the Afghan Journal of Legal Studies. Nafayalso served as a Shari’ah Advisor for the Afghanistan International Bank. He holds a JD/BCL(McGill), MA (Queen’s, Canada) in economics, and BA (McGill) in economics.