Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring. By Nimer Sultany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12354
• Published date: 01 September 2018

Book Reviews

Jennifer Balint, Editor

Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab

Spring. By Nimer Sultany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Reviewed by Mohammad Fadel, University of Toronto Faculty

of Law

It is hard to be too effusive in one’s praise for this book. It is

groundbreaking for several reasons: first, it removes constitu-

tional politics in the Arab world from some exotic margin of con-

stitutional studies and places it in the center of cutting-edge

debates about the relationship of revolution to rule of law, the

rule of law and legitimacy, and constituent power and constituted

power, showing how the Arab experience both enriches constitu-

tional theory and is enriched by it; second, its theoretical sophisti-

cation is unmatched by any other work in the field of Arab

constitutional politics; and, third, it takes seriously the contribu-

tions of Arab constitutional lawyers themselves by incorporating

their arguments and analysis into the structure of the book

instead of treating them simply as derivative authors with nothing

relevant to contribute to constitutional theory. This book’s contri-

bution is not limited to its theoretical ambition, however. Sultany

also skillfully incorporates several case studies drawn from numer-

ous Arab jurisdictions, which give his book a broad empirical

scope. This, too, is a marked contrast from much of previous

scholarship of the Arab Spring that focused largely on only one or

two Arab states.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets up the theo-

retical problem of legitimacy, rule of law and revolution, and the

tensions inherent in casting legitimacy in terms of either rule of

law or of revolution. Sultany reviews existing scholarship on the

history of constitutional politics in the Arab world in the nine-

teenth and twentieth centuries, expressing doubts about what he

calls the “formalist” approach of classifying Arab constitutions into

various ideal types, such as “ideological,” “instrumental,” or

“authoritarian.” He argues further that whatever legitimacy

defects exist in postindependence Arab regimes cannot be

Law & Society Review, Volume 52, Number 3 (2018)

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