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.