Abstract
I was recently asked to write a preface to the paperback edition of Nasser Hussain’s classic book, The Jurisprudence of Emergency. In reflecting on Nasser’s life and work, I wrote that “With the death of Nasser Hussain, we lost one of the most inventive and astute legal scholars of his generation. His words and ideas reached many people. Whenever Nasser gave a talk or a presentation at a professional meeting, the room would be filled. People knew that he would offer something worth hearing and worth pondering, on topics as different as colonial legality, theories of sovereignty, the poetry of W. H. Auden, drone warfare, executive clemency, the writ of habeas corpus, or the legal status of so-called enemy combatants. Only a scholar with a fierce intellect and creative, original mind could tackle such a wide range of topics and bring each of them to life so vividly.” Nasser “changed legal scholarship by insisting that political and legal theory could be productively enlisted to shed new light on history, and in turn he showed us that rigorous exploration of archives could enrich our theoretical understandings.”
But, much more important than what he did for our academic field, Nasser was a gem of a human being. He was kind, intuitive, warm, funny, and unfailingly generous. As a result, he had friends and intellectual companions around the world. We miss and mourn him.
I am grateful to Adam Sitze for calling together an extraordinary group of scholars to honor Nasser’s memory by reflecting on his many important contributions to the study of law, culture, and the humanities.