Hardy, Nicolas

Ph.D. Candidate, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Paris, France Nicolas Hardy is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre d’Étude des Normes Juridiques of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales where he is completing a dissertation on legal reasoning and financial innovation in Islamic law. In addition to field work in the Middle East, he stayed as a Visiting Researcher at the Islamic Legal Studies Program of the Harvard Law School during the Fall term of 2002. Before starting his Ph.D., Hardy worked in the commercial section of the French embassy in Cairo (Egypt) and for nearly four years as a banker, first in trade finance and correspondent banking in relation to Middle Eastern institutions, then in structured finance. Hardy received a Maîtrise in international business law from the University Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne and earned a degree in classical Arabic from the Institute National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Paris).