To those who pit Americans against immigrants and citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends.

—Attorney General John Ashcroft, 6 December 2001

The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War established human rights as a legitimate focus of international attention. In the half-century since, there have arisen nearly 100 universal and regional human rights agreements governing issues as diverse as discrimination against women, state-sponsored torture, and fair trials. Yet, as we embark on the twenty-first century, accompanied by the ongoing war on terrorism, there has been surprisingly little talk of these agreements. I want to take this opportunity to consider why, despite their ubiquity, human rights treaties have been largely ignored in current debates over how to address the myriad problems in the Middle East, and to suggest how we can make international agreements work more effectively to prevent abuses of human dignity.

Collectively, you law librarians gathered here must have been affected by the many legal fallouts from September 11: the Office of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, the Use of Military Force Resolution-, the thousands of casualties of all nationalities; the detainees; the military commissions; the prosecutions; the habeas cases. But even as you have studied and researched these individual issues, you have probably wondered whether something bigger is going on. Are these legal fallouts only symptoms of a much larger phenomenon: a post-World War II legal system placed under stress by September 11?

The IALL Board was delighted that Harvard Law School Library offered to host this additional day. The largest private academic law library in the United States, the institution was sure to attract many IALL members. I was especially pleased, since I had begun my career there seven years earlier. I knew well that the staff would provide an excellent Conference, and looked forward to be working with my former colleagues again.

The following is not by way of apology, I just want to set the record straight. Diaries offer a view from somewhere - a perspective that is usually skewed, partial and incomplete. They are subjective reflections on a particularly situated experience. So let me begin from the beginning:

I moved to Palestine early in September 2000. Two weeks later, the Intifada broke out. I had come to Palestine after finishing my PhD in the U.S. and working as a corporate lawyer in London. I had gone there with some vague urge “to be useful” - and if I thought being useful in Palestine meant saying farewell to middle-class life, I was soon proven wrong. For over a year I was teaching at Birzeit University and working as a legal adviser with the PLO Negotiations Support Unit. My interactions were mostly with middle-class Palestinians, sometimes the post-Oslo elite, often foreigners, seldom with the poor living in refugee camps. I lived in Al-Tireh, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Ramallah. I had access to a car with yellow license-plates. Yellow was a very important color there. It meant I could drive my car anywhere I wanted, to Jerusalem and beyond - unlike most Palestinians, who had green license plates and, hence, could not drive outside the cantons created by the Oslo Accords. I had a foreign passport, which meant I could leave the Occupied Territories whenever I wanted to through Tel Aviv airport – again, unlike most Palestinians, who could not use the airport without first applying for a security permit.

Thank you, Terry [Harry S. Martin III] for this kind introduction. I'm glad to be here to meet you all. I'm very fond of law librarians, perhaps because of Terry, who has given us such unstinting support for a program and for a body of literature that might otherwise be considered exotic or unnecessary. I don't think we've ever asked for anything from this Library that it has not tried its very best to give us. In our program we are aware that probably the most essential thing we can do—building for the long-term—is to strengthen the Library in our field. I have to admit, in my modest moments, that people most often come here to study with us, to join our program, not for us, but for the Library. Occasionally people let it slip.

My assignment has an added degree of difficulty in that I follow Frank Vogel's presentation on Islamic law, which captured your intellectual interest, and precede Lesley Wilkins’ talk on building a library collection, which will interest you professionally. I have chosen to offer a talk on the achievements made in non-Muslim — here primarily European and American — scholarship on Islamic law, scholarship in the making, as it were, hoping that it will segue easily from the one talk to the other. I will not be describing the Islamic Legal Studies Program and what we do, but if you have any questions about the research program we run, I will be happy to answer them afterwards.

After hearing the presentations about Islamic law by Professor Vogel and recent scholarship in the field by Peri Bearman, I hope you are convinced that the Law of the Islamic World is a subject of great breadth and complexity. What I would like to do now is describe how the Harvard Law School Library attempts to support teaching and research in this field. My talk will deal with the scope of collection development, acquisition strategies, processing standards, reference demands, and user education. I will also touch briefly on problematic areas and our hopes for future developments. Among the materials distributed after lunch, there is an eight-page handout, which, I hope, will highlight key points as my talk proceeds. At the end, there may still be adequate time for a few questions and discussion before we return to the Caspersen Room for the reception.