Dr. Azizah Y. al-Hibri is a Professor, Emeritus at the University of Richmond School of Law where she taught for twenty years. She is the first Muslim woman to become tenured in an American law school.

Dr. al-Hibri is a former professor of Philosophy, founding editor of Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and founder and president of KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights (see http://www.karamah.org). She is also a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

For the last two decades, Dr. al-Hibri has written and lectured extensively on issues of Muslim women’s rights, Islam and democracy, human rights in Islam, and Muslim civil rights in the U.S. Her seminal article Islamic Constitutionalism and the Concept of Democracy (24 Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, 1, 1992) focused on an issue that became dominant years later.  The same was true of her article A Critique of Personal Status Codes in Select Arab Countries, published in a United Nations series entitled Studies on Women and Development, no. 25 (1997).

Dr. al-Hibri publishes mostly in law journals and other legal publications. Her articles include: An Islamic Perspective on Domestic Violence, 27 Fordham International Law Journal 195 (December 2003), Redefining Muslim Women's Roles in the Next Century, in Democracy and the Rule of Law, Norman Dorsen and Prosser Gifford, eds. (Congressional Quarterly, 2001), Muslim Women's Rights in the Global Village: Opportunities and Challenges, in The Journal of Law and Religion (Fall, 2001).
 
Other important articles by Dr. al-Hibri include: “The Nature of the Islamic Marriage Contract: Sacramental, Covenantal or Contractual,” in Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective, J. Witte and E. Ellison, eds. (Eerdmans 2006), “Divine Justice and the Human Order: An Islamic Perspective,” in Humanity Before God: Contemporary Faces of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Ethics, ed. William Schweiker et al. (Fortress Press forthcoming 2006).  She also edited a section on Islam in Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (Columbia University Press 2006), and guest-edited a special volume on Islam for the Journal of Law and Religion (fall, 2001).

Dr. al-Hibri has traveled and lectured extensively in Muslim countries, and in Europe where she addressed Muslim communities as well as parliamentarians and human rights activists.  She has received many awards, including the Virginia First Freedom Award, presented in 2007 by the Council for America’s First Freedom.