When the internet went dark and the world outside narrowed to the walls of a single room, AmirAli Maleki kept writing. With reliable connectivity gone, the notes application on his phone became his means of defiance. Whenever everyday life pressed in on him, whether through a conversation or an image evoking fear or solidarity, he wrote it down before it could disappear.

A scholar of law and philosophy and JURIST’s Iran correspondent, Maleki focuses on the impact of international law and the theories that undergird it on the lives of those around him. He is the 2026 recipient of the David M. Crane Rule of Law Award, given by JURIST to a journalist who, in the face of formidable obstacles, shows extraordinary dedication and integrity in uncovering and scrutinizing rule-of-law issues. The award is named for David M. Crane, founding Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

Across his writing, Maleki has been developing a distinctive conceptual vocabulary — “political stuttering,” “floating norms,” “legal memory,” a “postmodern natural law” — drawn from thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Kelsen, and Al-Farabi, and tested against the lived realities of contemporary Iran. What unites these ideas is a conviction that thought must remain tethered to life, and that neither law nor language ever arrives at completion.

In this conversation, Maleki speaks about the duty of remembrance, the limits of political language, the “Iranianization” of legal thought, why he writes about football, and what he hopes a new generation of Iranian scholars can bring to international legal theory.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You have written prolifically since the start of the war, at times on a notes app without reliable internet. Can you describe what it was like to work under those conditions, and what drove you to continue your intellectual pursuits under such dire circumstances? 

Before answering the question directly, I think we should first ask a more fundamental one: what is the role of an intellectual? And what do we actually mean when we use that word?

To me, being an intellectual is not a permanent identity attached to a particular person. It is a contingent role that anyone can assume at certain moments. An intellectual is not a special social class. Any individual, under particular circumstances, can generate illuminating ideas and help make sense of the world around them.

In my own case, I am first and foremost a student and a legal scholar who is still learning. Yet there are moments when I also become an intellectual in this broader sense. What gives rise to that role are all the other roles I inhabit: being a son, a partner, a brother, a teacher, a friend, and ultimately a citizen. The intellectual emerges when these lived experiences create a responsibility to remember, to reflect, and to bear witness.

For me, the central task of the intellectual is remembrance. We have a duty to recall and record the events, encounters, and images that pass through our social lives, especially when circumstances encourage forgetting. To remember is not merely an act of preserving the past; it is a form of resistance. It is a way of insisting that experiences matter and that they deserve to be articulated and shared.

This is why, during the war, I continued writing whenever I could. Internet access was often unreliable or unavailable, so my phone’s notes application became my workspace. Whenever something in everyday life struck me — a conversation, an image, a contradiction, a moment of fear or solidarity — I wrote it down immediately. I did so because I believe in the power of remembrance. I wanted to preserve those moments before they disappeared.

I also do not believe that this responsibility belongs only to academics or highly educated people. In many ways, everyone performs this intellectual role instinctively. This is especially true in Iran, where political life is remarkably visible and tangible, shaping even the smallest aspects of everyday existence. Under such conditions, ordinary people constantly observe, interpret, and remember. Intellectual work is not confined to universities; it is woven into daily life itself. In that sense, whether one works in law, politics, philosophy, or any other field, the fundamental task remains the same: to remember. My notes app was simply the field on which I practiced that task.

There is a passage in Hegel that has always stayed with me. He suggests that when thought becomes detached from lived reality, it enters a condition of lifelessness. I have always tried to move in the opposite direction. Through observing, recording, and wandering through everyday life almost like a flâneur, I try to remain oriented toward life rather than abstraction. Much of my writing emerges from walking, listening to people, speaking with them, and paying attention to ordinary experiences. My ideas do not originate in isolation; they emerge from encounters with the world.

That is why I never see myself solely as an intellectual. The intellectual is only one role among many. Outside of writing, I must continue living the other social roles that make thought possible in the first place. Even today, my phone is full of unfinished notes and fragments of ideas. I hope that in the coming years I will have the opportunity to develop many of them into more complete works.

Your concept of “political stuttering” runs through much of your recent work. For readers encountering it for the first time, how would you explain it, and what experience first crystallized it for you?

The concept of “political stuttering” emerged from my engagement with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, particularly what I sometimes describe as the “wisdom of stuttering.” For Gadamer, one of the deepest truths about human understanding is that we can never fully say what we mean. There is always a gap between thought and expression, between experience and language. Meaning remains unfinished, and it is precisely this incompleteness that makes dialogue possible.

Many people interpret this limitation as a weakness. Gadamer, however, treats it as a virtue. Human beings understand because they are never in possession of a final or complete truth. We speak, we fail to express ourselves fully, we revise our words, and through that process we learn. In other words, understanding begins not in certainty but in the acknowledgment of our linguistic limits.

This insight led me to a broader question in legal and political philosophy: if all human affairs are mediated through language, and if politics is fundamentally a human activity, then politics must also experience its own form of stuttering. From that idea emerged my concept of “political stuttering.”

Political stuttering is not simply hesitation, confusion, or weakness. Rather, it is the condition in which political actors confront the limits of their own vocabulary. It is the moment when existing political language becomes insufficient to describe reality. A healthy political order recognizes this limitation and remains open to correction, reinterpretation, and dialogue. An unhealthy political order treats its language as complete and unquestionable.

This is why I argue that political life requires an ethics of discourse. Political actors must be allowed to make mistakes, revise their judgments, and learn from experience. Politics is never a finished project. No individual, party, or government can legitimately claim that it possesses the final formula for political truth. Whenever someone claims absolute certainty in politics, I become suspicious, because politics is not the realm of perfection but of fallibility. In that sense, politics is not the art of being right; it is the art of learning through error.

Political communities develop historically. They grow, adapt, misjudge situations, and sometimes fail. Those failures are not accidental defects but part of political life itself. There can be no final justification, no ultimate political vocabulary that permanently resolves disagreement.

In my article “When Power Cannot Hear: Political Stuttering and the Fate of Iran,” I extended this argument to the level of state power. There I argued that political stuttering becomes dangerous when governments lose the ability to hear alternative voices or translate their convictions into a language others can understand. Power begins to repeat itself instead of communicating. It speaks louder but says less. Negotiation becomes impossible because the political vocabulary has become closed rather than dialogical. In such circumstances, the problem is not merely political disagreement; it is a deeper hermeneutic crisis in which language itself loses its capacity to mediate between competing perspectives.

The Iranian experience played an important role in crystallizing this idea for me. Living in a political environment where certain forms of dialogue often become difficult or even impossible made me increasingly attentive to the relationship between language, legitimacy, and power. I became interested in how political systems sometimes lose the ability to negotiate — not because they lack strength, but because they lack a vocabulary capable of accommodating plurality and uncertainty.

Ultimately, political stuttering is not merely a diagnosis of political failure. It is also a defense of intellectual humility. It reminds us that every political language is incomplete, every political order is historically contingent, and every society must preserve spaces where disagreement, revision, and learning remain possible. For me, that is the deepest lesson I inherited from Gadamer and have tried to translate into the language of law, politics, and the lived realities of contemporary Iran.

How has living through this period in Iran shaped your understanding of international law — where has it confirmed what you’d studied, and where has it exposed gaps between theory and reality?

Living through this period in Iran has not simply influenced my understanding of international law; it has fundamentally transformed the questions I ask of it.

Many observers frame the issue as a tension between legal theory and political reality, asking where reality confirms theory and where it exposes its limitations. I understand the question, but I would answer it somewhat differently: I do not believe there is a definitive gap between theory and reality in the first place. Reality never fits completely within theory, and theory never fully captures reality. Every theory speaks with a certain stutter. It reaches toward the world but never exhausts it. The task of legal thought, therefore, is not to produce a final correspondence between theory and reality but to continuously extend itself toward a reality that always remains a few steps ahead. Theory is unfinished by nature. Its vitality lies precisely in its incompleteness.

This conviction has become stronger as I have lived and worked in Iran. The experience of inhabiting a society marked by historical ruptures, competing normative orders, and intense political contestation has convinced me that legal theory cannot simply be imported and applied. It must emerge from the historical and cultural experiences through which people actually live. For me, the Iranianization of legal philosophy and international legal thought is therefore not a choice but a necessity. I cannot imagine engaging in jurisprudence without undertaking that task.

By “Iranianization,” I do not mean intellectual isolation or the rejection of global legal traditions. Quite the opposite. I mean taking seriously the idea that every legal order possesses its own historical memory, conceptual vocabulary, and inherited normative experiences. International law, like all law, is interpreted and lived through particular cultural horizons. If legal thought ignores those horizons, it risks becoming abstract and detached from life.

This has led me toward a broader theoretical intuition: I increasingly believe that law is, in a certain sense, genetic. Not biological, of course, but cultural and historical. Just as Alfred Kroeber argued that culture is transmitted across generations and survives those who carry it, legal norms are also inherited. They do not simply disappear when institutions change or constitutions are rewritten. They remain sedimented within what I call a society’s legal memory.

This is where I seek to extend classical legal theory. Hans Kelsen’s idea of a higher norm remains extraordinarily important, but I increasingly think of that norm not as a static foundation but as a living ocean. Individual legal norms float within it. Some disappear beneath the surface, while others re-emerge when historical circumstances require them. I sometimes describe these as “floating norms” — normative forms that never entirely vanish because they remain preserved within the deeper legal memory of a people. The superior norm, in this sense, is not merely a logical presupposition. It is a historical inheritance. It carries traces of past generations, past struggles, and past understandings of justice.

Legal development therefore resembles neither creation ex nihilo nor linear progress. It is a continuous process of remembering, transforming, and rearticulating inherited normative resources. My experience in Iran has reinforced this belief. History is not something external to legal thought; it constitutes legal thought. I do not stand outside history and theorize about it. History theorizes through me. The questions I ask, the concepts I develop, and even the problems I find urgent are shaped by the historical world into which I have been thrown.

This is why I believe theorizing remains both necessary and inevitably stuttering. We can never achieve a final theory capable of fully encompassing reality. Every theoretical achievement opens new questions and reveals new limitations. Yet this incompleteness is not a failure. It is what makes thought possible.

For me, the future of legal philosophy lies not in constructing a perfect correspondence between law and reality but in understanding their continuity. Theory and reality are not opposing realms; they are moments within the same unfolding process. Theory moves toward reality, reality transforms theory, and neither ever comes to rest. As scholars, our responsibility is not to claim that we have finally captured the world in concepts, but to continue pursuing a world that constantly exceeds them. That is the path I hope to follow in my own work: developing a jurisprudence that takes history, memory, inheritance, and cultural experience seriously while remaining open to the unfinished character of legal thought.

For me, theory is not a destination but a movement. It advances toward reality, while reality simultaneously transforms the conditions of thought. Neither ever stands still. The responsibility of the legal philosopher is therefore not to produce a final theory, but to remain faithful to this movement — to continue thinking, interpreting, and revising.

In that sense, legal theory is not the search for certainty; it is the discipline of remaining in pursuit of a reality that forever exceeds us.

Your newest project explores international law through the lens of Islamic philosophy. What do you think that tradition offers international legal thought that the historically dominant Western frameworks miss?

My newest project explores the possibility of reading international legal thought through Islamic philosophy, but not in the sense of offering an “alternative” tradition to replace dominant Western frameworks. Rather, my aim is to question the very assumption that legal theory can be grounded in a single intellectual genealogy.

International law, as we know it today, has largely been shaped by particular European historical experiences. It has produced powerful conceptual tools, but it has never been the only language available for thinking about law, justice, and political coexistence. What interests me is the possibility of bringing Islamic philosophy into a sustained and equal dialogue with contemporary jurisprudence.

In particular, I draw on Al-Farabi’s idea of the *Madinah al-Jama’iyyah*, the collective or communal city, as a way of rethinking political and legal temporality. Farabi does not present political order as a fixed institutional structure, but as a living and evolving formation sustained by successive generations. Each generation inherits a world that is already meaningful, but it does not simply repeat it. It reinterprets, rearticulates, and transforms it through discourse, deliberation, and collective reasoning. In this sense, political life is fundamentally historical and generational. A community is not defined only by its present institutions, but by the continuity of interpretation across time.

This is where I see a deep connection between Islamic philosophy and my own conceptual work on “political stuttering.” Traditions, like political languages, never fully say what they contain. They are always partially silent, partially incomplete, and therefore open to future articulation. They speak, but they also hesitate; they reveal, but they also conceal. From a Gadamerian perspective, tradition is not an object external to us, but an event in which we are already involved. We do not stand outside tradition and interpret it from a neutral position; rather, we are always already inside it. Tradition happens to us through language, rituals, inherited practices, and historical memory. For this reason, our encounter with tradition is never complete or transparent. It is always mediated, partial, and, in a sense, stuttering. We grasp fragments, we revise interpretations, and we return again and again to meanings that remain open.

This has important implications for legal theory. If both law and tradition are historically unfolding processes, then legal reasoning cannot be reduced to the application of fixed rules to stable realities. Law is itself part of a broader movement of interpretation across time. Norms are inherited, but they are never simply preserved intact. They are reactivated, reinterpreted, and reinserted into new historical circumstances. In this sense, I think of legal norms as existing within what I would call a “legal memory”: a deep, inherited horizon in which past norms are never entirely abolished but continue to circulate in transformed ways.

Here I find it useful to engage critically with Kelsen’s idea of the basic norm. Rather than understanding it as a static foundational presupposition, I tend to think of it more dynamically, almost as an oceanic field in which norms float and move. Some norms rise to the surface under certain historical conditions, others recede, but none are entirely extinguished. The basic norm, in this expanded sense, becomes less a fixed point and more a living structure of normative possibility shaped by historical experience.

This is also where my idea of the “genetic” character of legal theory emerges. I do not mean this biologically, but historically and culturally. Drawing loosely on Alfred Kroeber’s understanding of culture as something transmitted across generations, I understand legal thought as something inherited. It is passed on not only through institutions or doctrines, but through language, memory, and forms of life. In this sense, legal theory is never created from nothing; it is always an act of reworking what has already been given.

For this reason, I do not think there is a strict separation between theory and reality. The common assumption that theory lags behind or fails to capture reality presupposes two stable domains. But in my view, both are continuously unfolding. Reality is never fully given, and theory is never fully complete. Both are movements rather than fixed states. Theory stutters because reality exceeds it, and reality becomes intelligible only through the incomplete languages we use to approach it. What exists between them is not a gap, but a continuous process of mutual transformation.

From this perspective, Islamic philosophy is not merely a historical subject of study but a living intellectual resource for rethinking contemporary legal problems. It allows us to reconnect legal theory with historical experience, linguistic inheritance, and cultural memory in a way that can enrich international legal discourse. My belief is that we must not abandon our historical and linguistic foundations in order to participate in global conversations; rather, we must learn how to speak from within them.

Ultimately, my project is an attempt to develop a form of legal theory that is both historically grounded and conceptually open-ended. It seeks to bring Islamic philosophy, especially Farabi’s political thought, into dialogue with contemporary jurisprudence in order to show that law is not a closed system but an ongoing historical becoming. Legal theory, like tradition itself, never arrives at completion. It moves, it transforms, and it stutters through time — always partially formed, always in the process of becoming something more than what it already is.

You recently received the David M. Crane Rule of Law Award. What does the idea of the “rule of law” mean to you, writing from a context where it is so contested?

I am very honored to have received the David M. Crane Rule of Law Award. I see it as a meaningful recognition not only of my individual work, but of a broader conviction: that legal and political thought does not cease to speak, even under conditions of silence, disruption, or rupture.

For me, this award also confirms something I have long believed — that thought does not remain silent. Even when communication is interrupted, when access to the world is cut off, or when political conditions become unstable, ideas continue to circulate, to be read, and to be reactivated. In my own experience, there were moments when I was writing under conditions of extreme isolation and uncertainty, yet I still felt that my texts were being received, interpreted, and carried forward by others. This reinforced my belief that theory is not bound to immediate visibility. It survives through interpretation, attention, and intellectual transmission.

In that sense, I understand the rule of law not only as a legal doctrine, but as the continuity of legal meaning across interruption. It is the idea that law remains a language of responsibility, justification, and critique even under conditions of fragility. The rule of law, therefore, is inseparable from the persistence of legal language itself — from its capacity to be repeated, contested, and re-signified across time.

This is also where I see the role of the legal philosopher or theorist. A jurist is not merely a technician of norms, but a linguistic actor — a participant in the ongoing game of legal language. To engage in legal theory is to work within language, to test its limits, and to keep it alive through interpretation and reinvention. Law exists not only as structure, but as a form of linguistic practice that must constantly be performed, questioned, and renewed.

From this perspective, I do not see law as a purely technical instrument for stabilizing political power. Rather, law is also inherently critical. It carries within itself a historical memory — a sedimentation of past conflicts, interpretations, and injustices. Because of this memory, law is never fully closed or self-identical. It constantly demands reinterpretation. It obliges us to return to norms that may have become outdated or unjust and to rework them in light of present conditions.

This is why I believe that legal theory is, at its core, a form of engagement with the historical life of norms. The task of the jurist is not only to apply law, but also to play with its language: to deconstruct, reconstruct, and reactivate it when necessary. Legal language is not merely regulatory; it is also creative and critical. It can preserve, but it can also transform.

I therefore see my own responsibility as a legal scholar as one of sustaining this linguistic and historical movement. To continue the life of legal language means to ensure that it remains capable of self-correction — that it can respond to its own failures, its own exclusions, and its own moments of injustice. If a legal form becomes detached from its historical conditions or ceases to reflect the realities it governs, it is the task of legal thought to re-open it, to reinterpret it, and, if necessary, to reconstruct it.

In this sense, law is not only a mechanism of political stabilization. It is also a site of tension between memory and change. It remembers past forms of life, but it must also be able to transform them. It is precisely in this tension that legal theory becomes necessary.

Ultimately, I understand jurisprudence as the continuous work of engaging with legal language: playing with it, questioning it, and keeping it open to revision. The rule of law, in its deepest sense, is not simply the rule of rules, but the endurance of a living legal language — one that is capable of critique, self-reflection, and transformation across time.

You wrote an article on the World Cup after watching the Iranian team’s situation in the United States. What drew you to football as a site of legal and political analysis?

What drew me to football, and more broadly to sport, is not only its institutional or political dimensions, but its deeply philosophical structure as an event of lived time. I am interested in moments of everyday life that appear, at first glance, to be “non-theoretical,” yet in fact contain dense forms of meaning, tension, and reflection. Football, in this sense, is not outside theory — it is one of the places where theory becomes unavoidable.

My starting point is the idea that games do not simply exist for us to think about them. Rather, they address us; they call us into a form of attention. A game is not merely an object of analysis, but an event that gathers us and demands presence. In that sense, I understand play as carrying a kind of serious, almost sacred gravity — not in a religious sense, but in the sense that it interrupts ordinary time and forces us into reflection. During a match, we are no longer outside observers of life; we are inside a temporal experience that makes us aware of our own existence as something unfolding in real time.

This is why football became meaningful to me as a site of legal and political reflection. It is precisely in such everyday events that questions of value, belonging, conflict, and interpretation become visible in their most immediate form. A football match is not only a competition; it is also a space where collective emotions, national narratives, and historical memories briefly crystallize. In that moment, we are forced to think about what it means to belong, to compete, to lose, and to be represented.

This connects directly to my broader concern with “political stuttering” and the importance of lived experience. Much of contemporary international legal discourse has become detached from such lived moments. International law, in many respects, risks becoming a technical and abstract language that no longer speaks to the texture of everyday life. At its worst, it becomes a kind of procedural emptiness — a formal system that circulates concepts without grounding them in lived reality. I share a deep concern about this tendency.

One of my main criticisms of contemporary legal scholarship, particularly in journals of international law, is that it often speaks exclusively in the language of legal reasoning while remaining distant from the lived experience that gives legal reasoning its meaning. There is a widespread assumption that “legal argument” is self-sufficient, as if it could exist independently of the world it claims to interpret. But what is legal reasoning, if not a structured engagement with everyday life seen through a normative and interpretive lens?

In this sense, I do not see legal reasoning as a purely technical exercise. It is, at its core, a form of interpretation of lived reality — a way of playing with the forms of life that constitute our social world. To reason legally is to enter into the tension between norms and experience, between abstraction and life, and to attempt to articulate meaning within that tension. It is, in a way, a disciplined form of “play” with reality.

From this perspective, football becomes more than a metaphor. It becomes a reminder that interpretation always happens in time, within events, and through embodied participation. It reminds us that meaning is not static; it unfolds. We do not stand outside the game of life in order to analyze it. We are already inside it, already moved by it, already implicated in its unfolding logic.

This is also why I believe international legal theory urgently needs to recover its connection to everyday life. Without this connection, it risks becoming what I would describe as a purely technical darkness — a system of concepts that no longer reflects the complexity of human experience. My own work tries to resist this tendency by returning to ordinary moments, to lived encounters, and to the small narratives that structure social existence.

Ultimately, what interests me in football is not football itself, but the way it reveals something fundamental about human temporality, attention, and interpretation. It shows us that we are always already inside meaning, not outside it. And it reminds us that law, like play, must remain alive to the world it seeks to interpret — otherwise it loses its ability to speak in a meaningful way. In that sense, my engagement with sport is part of a broader intellectual project: to reconnect legal thought with the rhythms of everyday life, and to reimagine legal reasoning not as a detached technique, but as a living, interpretive, and deeply human form of engagement with the world.

What do you wish international audiences understood about the experiences of young scholars and intellectuals in Iran right now?

What I wish international audiences understood is that young scholars and intellectuals in Iran are not merely observers of global debates, but active participants in them. Yet for this participation to become fully visible and intellectually productive, there needs to be a shift in how international academic spaces understand and receive voices from outside the dominant centers of knowledge production.

One of my main concerns is the overreliance on narrow methodological expectations — particularly the repetitive emphasis on “legal reasoning” as if it were a self-sufficient and universal language. Of course, legal reasoning is important, but when it becomes the only accepted form of expression, it risks reducing legal thought to a technical exercise detached from lived experience, historical depth, and cultural variation. What is needed is not less rigor, but more openness to different intellectual idioms of reasoning, narration, and interpretation.

Young Iranian scholars are often forced to translate their intellectual lives into pre-existing frameworks in order to be heard. My argument is that this translation should not be a one-way process. International legal discourse must also open itself to being transformed by these voices. It must allow other styles of thinking, other genealogies of concepts, and other relationships between theory and life to enter the conversation on equal terms.

I believe this is particularly urgent in the field of international law. The discipline cannot remain confined to a limited set of conceptual traditions while claiming universality. It needs a genuine pluralization of voices and intellectual horizons. In this sense, I strongly believe that there is a growing necessity for what one might call an Iranian presence in international legal theory — not as a token inclusion, but as a substantive contribution to the way legal problems are framed and understood.

By “Iranian presence,” I do not mean a fixed identity or a single perspective. I mean a historically grounded, linguistically rich, and conceptually diverse mode of thinking that emerges from a specific intellectual and cultural experience. The world does not need a homogenized global legal discourse; it needs a plurality of legal imaginations that can challenge, complement, and expand one another.

In this regard, I see the present moment as historically significant. The expansion of digital communication and academic networks has already transformed the conditions of intellectual visibility. It is now possible for scholars from Iran and many other contexts to intervene directly in global conversations with greater immediacy than before. This has created, for the first time, a genuinely transnational space of intellectual exchange that was previously inaccessible. I consider myself part of a generation that is beginning to inhabit this space more directly — a generation of Iranian scholars who are not only translating ideas outward, but also producing theory that is meant to circulate internationally from the beginning. In that sense, I see myself as part of what might be called an emerging generation of internationally engaged Iranian intellectuals.

Ultimately, I believe the world of international law would benefit enormously from taking these voices seriously — not as peripheral contributions, but as central interventions in the ongoing rethinking of the discipline itself. The future of international legal thought depends on its ability to hear new languages of critique, new forms of argumentation, and new ways of connecting law to lived experience. What is at stake is not simply inclusion, but transformation. International law needs to be reimagined as a space of genuine intellectual plurality, where different traditions of thought are not only represented, but allowed to reshape the very questions we ask. In that sense, giving space to Iranian scholars and other historically underrepresented voices is not an act of generosity — it is an intellectual necessity for the future of the field.

What’s next for you — what are you hoping to build over the next few years, and how can the international academic community help?

What I hope to build in the coming years is, in a broad sense, a renewed philosophy of law — both within Iran and in the global academic space. I do not see this as the production of a closed system of ideas, but as a continuous effort to expand and revitalize legal thought, especially at a time when legal theory risks becoming either overly technical or disconnected from lived experience.

At the center of my current work is what I would describe as a project of a “postmodern natural law.” By this I do not mean a return to classical natural law doctrines, but rather a rethinking of natural law in light of contemporary conditions of life, communication, and social existence. I am particularly interested in what could be called a form of “virtual natural law”: a conception of legal normativity that emerges from the evolving conditions of human life in a globally interconnected, technologically mediated, and historically situated world.

Within this framework, I am developing what I call the idea of the “virtual legal subject” and a “people in the making” — a conception of legal and political life that is constantly being redefined through changing circumstances, needs, and forms of social interaction. Law, in this sense, is not simply imposed upon life from above, but continuously emerges from within the dynamic structure of everyday existence. It is shaped by how people actually live, communicate, and interpret their own conditions of survival and coexistence.

My broader aim is to bring this kind of thinking more firmly into both international legal theory and Iranian intellectual life. I believe philosophy of law must return to the center of legal scholarship. Over the past decades, legal theory has often been marginalized in favor of more technical or doctrinal approaches. I see this as a loss for the discipline as a whole. My intention is to contribute to restoring philosophy of law as a serious, expansive, and globally engaged field of inquiry.

In practical terms, I also hope to be able to work extensively within law departments internationally, contributing to both teaching and research in legal philosophy and international law. I am committed to building a sustained academic presence in these spaces, and I hope that such opportunities will be made available, not only for me personally, but for a broader generation of scholars working across different intellectual and geographical contexts.

At the same time, I see this as a shared responsibility between scholars and academic institutions. The international academic community plays a crucial role in shaping what kinds of voices and perspectives are able to enter and transform the field. I therefore hope that there will be greater openness to intellectual approaches that do not simply reproduce existing frameworks, but seek to expand and reconfigure them.

Ultimately, my goal is to strengthen philosophy of law as a living and evolving discipline — one that is capable of engaging seriously with the transformations of contemporary life, while remaining grounded in historical and cultural depth. I am currently working toward developing a postmodern theory of natural law that can respond to these challenges in a conceptually rigorous and globally meaningful way, and I hope to continue pursuing this trajectory in collaboration with international academic communities.

In this sense, what I am trying to do is not simply to add another voice to existing debates, but to participate in reshaping the field itself. Legal philosophy, for me, is not a closed domain of inquiry; it is an open, ongoing, and collective project. And I hope to be able to contribute to its expansion — both in Iran and in the broader world of international legal scholarship.