Nicholas H D FOSTER
Visiting Senior Fellow
Visiting Period : 2 September 2013 to 20 September 2013

Nick is Senior Lecturer in Commercial Law, School of Law, SOAS, University of London. He was the principal founding editor of the Journal of Comparative Law and has been Co-Director of the Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, SOAS, a member of the Higher Education Academy's Islamic Studies Project Advisory Board, the Steering Group of the British Association for Islamic Studies and the Advisory Group of the Islamic Law Curriculum Development Project. Educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (Law and Arabic) and the University of Aix-Marseille III (French Law), he trained as a solicitor in the City of London and was a practising solicitor for some years. Now a full-time academic, Nick's research interests include comparative commercial and corporate law with special reference to corporate law theory, Islamic commercial law and Islamic finance. His publications include several detailed comparative accounts of specialist areas of Islamic commercial law. His present research work is focused on the transformation of law in the Middle East and the legal aspects of Islamic finance. In the latter field, he has pioneered the idea that a new Islamic financial law has developed and, together with Professor Simon Archer, is working on the nature of this new law and the problems resulting from the lack of a Shariah legal infrastructure to support it. Nick has also been working on an online bibliography in the Law of Islamic Finance and a Working Papers Series in the Law of Islamic Finance. Both projects are now approaching completion. Nick has extensive teaching experience and in 2006 was awarded the SOAS Director's Teaching Prize.

Islamic Finance and Secular Legal Systems is a truism that Islamic finance is based on the Shariah. However, neither the Shariah nor Islamic finance has its own legal system, so the application and enforcement of Islamic finance depends on the secular law of nation states. A particularly important aspect of this situation is that disputes have to be adjudicated through the national system, which usually means the secular courts. The results of some recent cases resolved in this way have led to a considerable degree of controversy. For example, some commentators have criticised the English courts for refusing to adjudicate Shariah issues, while others have criticised the Malaysian courts for doing just that. Other solutions have been proposed, such as arbitration and alternative dispute resolution, in order to sidestep the problems associated with court-based methods. In like manner, Islamic finance transactions may also have to exist and operate within the context of conventional insolvency laws, which were not designed for Islamic finance and had not been developed with Islamic finance in mind.

In this workshop we will consider the dispute resolution issue by looking at the general background to the problem, the situation in England, Malaysia and arbitration/ADR. On the question of the impact and relevance of the insolvency regime in relation to Islamic finance, the Singaporean insolvency regime will be examined. Some potential solutions will also be explored and examined.

Report of Workshop Proceedings