Dominik Krell

Dominik Krell is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS) and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. 

Before coming to Oxford, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. He has been a visiting fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh and a guest researcher at the University of Bergen.

He is trained in law (German State Examination) and holds a B.A. in History and Culture of the Middle East from Freie Universität Berlin, as well as an M.Sc. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford.

His doctoral thesis, "Islamic Law in Saudi Arabia: Concepts, Practices, and Developments" (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law/University of Hamburg, 2021), employs a multi-disciplinary approach to examine the prevailing understanding of Islamic law in the Saudi judiciary. Based on interviews with high-ranking Islamic scholars, recently published court decisions, and seldom-seen legal literature, it shows that Saudi jurists have reinterpreted key aspects of Islamic jurisprudence, opening the way for various important legal reforms in recent decades.

His thesis received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for outstanding academic achievement, the German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO) Dissertation Award, the Association for Arabic and Islamic Law (GAIR) Dissertation Award, and an honorable mention for the 2023 BRAIS Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World.

In addition to his work on Saudi Arabia, he has published on various aspects of Iraqi, Syrian, and Palestinian family law, and has translated the family codes of Syria and Iraq from Arabic into German. He has also authored and contributed to expert opinions on the laws of several Middle Eastern countries.