Research Interests
Private international law, family law, Islam in Europe, law and anthropology
Research Areas
England and Wales, France
Profile
Jana Araji is a PhD Candidate in the Law and Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. She is a part of the Cultural and Religious Diversity under State Law across Europe (CUREDI) research group. Her current research focuses on the issues arising from the non-recognition of personal status or family relations that have been established abroad, and their impact on the concerned individuals and families in Europe.
She holds a Bachelor of Laws from Paris Descartes University (Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi), a Master 1 in International Law from the University of Strasbourg, and a joint LLM/Master 2 in Comparitive and European Private International Law from the University of Dundee and Toulouse I Capitole University. As a law student, she interned for several law firms in the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon, focusing on commercial law and intellectual property law. After graduating, she joined the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) as an intern on the team focusing on cross-border family law issues as well as developments relating to digital economy.
Why Law and Anthropology?
Since my research explores the overlap between law and religion and the complex issues that arise therein, it is necessary to investigate how the people to whom the law applies view their relationship to the law, especially as it relates to their religious identities. Moreover, to concretely identify the impact of the application of legal rules that should, ideally, fulfil a neutral function, it seems appropriate to look beyond the legal effects and investigate through an anthropological lens how law manifests itself in the daily lives of the people concerned. In other words, legal analysis is certainly of utmost importance, but it forms only one part of of a larger picture that anthropology and its methodologies can help to discover. My research also often deals with the interactions between public and private law, two categories that are traditionally kept separate within legal reasoning. In-depth study of culture and society can go a long way towards challenging this firm dichotomy.