Professional Background
Nadjma Yassari is Director of the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in Lausanne and Professor of Private International Law, Comparative Law and Islamic Law at the Universities of Zurich and Hamburg.
Born in Tehran, she was educated in Vienna, Paris, Innsbruck, London and Damascus. Her academic research began with the study of Islamic legal traditions and private international law and developed into a broader comparative perspective.
Her work brings together legal systems, languages and institutional settings and analyses how they interact in practice. It develops and applies comparative methods that situate law within its social and institutional context.
From 2009 to 2024, she led the research group “Changes in God’s Law” at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, an internationally unique unit dedicated to the comparative analysis of contemporary family and succession law in Muslim jurisdictions. The group established this field as a distinct area of comparative research.
Her work is regularly used in legal practice. It has been cited by courts, including the German Federal Court of Justice and the German Constitutional Court, and informs advisory work for public authorities.
Areas of Interest
- How legal systems interact in real-life cross-border family and succession cases
- How legal, linguistic and cultural differences shape decision-making in courts and public authorities
- How legal rules relate to people’s lives and social realities
- How legal knowledge is created, interpreted and applied in practice
Publications
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