Ms Noora Al-Saai

Noora is interested in critical and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of law. Her PhD project takes a sociolegal outlook on issues of private international law and looks at how these issues interrelate with questions of legal pluralism and human rights. More specifically, her proposed project studies the interaction between state law, religious law, and customary law in the domains of nationality and international, mixed, and minority marriages in Qatar and select GCC jurisdictions from sociolegal and comparative perspectives.

Noora is a Lecturer of Law at Qatar University. Before commencing her PhD project at SOAS, she read an MSc in Law, Anthropology and Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an LLB at Qatar University. After her masters, Noora spent a year working actively with the Qatari legal team which handled and oversaw international disputes where Qatar is an applicant or a respondent, such as cases before the International Court of Justice and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. During this time, she interacted with many Qataris of mixed Qatari-GCC families in the fact-finding processes and experienced working alongside international lawyers and experts from esteemed firms.