The Shadow and the Sun

Abstract

This article traces certain concerns of natural justice in the thought of Nasser Hussain through the lens of several of Hussain’s writings. The article’s first section examines the 1966 privacy case, Griswold v. Connecticut, as a paradigm of certain natural law concerns which become important in Hussain’s work on the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. The second section examines a chapter of Hussain’s book The Jurisprudence of Emergency, on nineteenth-century Indian and British legal history, in the context of relevant strands of thought from previous eras, chiefly Montesquieu and Thomas Hobbes; the analysis asserts that the primitive or “natural” portrayals of colonial populations constructed by European legal-political ideologies inflect natural-law thinking in a way which sheds light on the concerns of the article’s first section. The third section moves to Hussain’s concern with recent American use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) in the Middle East, tracing their history through the postcolonial era to render broad conclusions about how some of Hussain’s larger natural-justice concerns might be addressed.