Dr. Dominik Krell

Biography

Dominik Krell is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS) and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He trained in law with a German State Examination and holds a B.A. in History and Culture of the Middle East from Freie Universität Berlin and an M.Sc. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Prior to his current position, Krell was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, and a visiting fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, as well as a guest researcher at the University of Bergen. His forthcoming book, "Islamic Law in Saudi Arabia" (Brill, 2025), adopts a multidisciplinary approach to examine the prevailing understanding of Islamic law within the Saudi judiciary based on interviews with high-ranking Islamic scholars and analysis of published court decisions. The work reveals how Saudi jurists have reinterpreted key aspects of Islamic jurisprudence, facilitating significant legal reforms in recent decades. This book is based on his doctoral thesis completed at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Hamburg, which earned him the Otto Hahn Medal from the Max Planck Society for outstanding academic achievement, as well as the Dissertation Award from both the German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO) and the Association for Arabic and Islamic Law (GAIR), and an honorable mention for the 2023 BRAIS Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World. In addition to research on Saudi Arabia, Krell has published works addressing aspects of Iraqi, Syrian, and Palestinian family law and has contributed expert opinions on laws in various Middle Eastern countries.

Research Interests