Rabiat Akande, SJD
Associate Professor, Carey School of Law
Rabiat Akande joined the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in 2024 and was appointed as the 2025 Wilson H. Elkins Professor by the University System of Maryland. She works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law, and (post)colonial African law and society.
Professor Akande is the author of Entangled Domains: Empire, Law, and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a work that has received several honors including Special Mention, the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) Book Prize; Honorable Mention, the Canadian Law and Society Association Wesley Pue Book Prize; and Finalist, African Studies Association Book Prize.
Professor Akande was awarded the American Society of International Law's Francis Deak Prize in 2025 for her article "An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law," published in the American Journal of International Law. Professor Akande has authored several other works, including "Centering the Black Muslimah: An Agenda for Intersectionalizing the Study of Islamophobia" in Anver Emon, ed., Systemic Islamophobia (University of Toronto Press, 2023), a volume named to The Hill Times' 100 Best Books of 2023.
Her work has appeared in several publications including the Journal of Law and Religion, Law and History Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Supreme Court Review, American Journal of Comparative Law (forthcoming), and in volumes by Cambridge University Press, University of Toronto Press, and University of Virginia Press. Currently, she is working on a collaborative book volume that revisits and recovers ideas about international law in Africa before the 20th century, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She is also co-editing an encyclopedia of law and religion (Elgar Publishing: under contract). Professor Akande is also working on a monograph exploring Malcolm X's intellectual legacy, tentatively titled Malcolm X, Black Globalism, and the Human Rights Critique of Imperialism.
Professor Akande chairs the international legal history project at the African Institute of International Law in Arusha, with support from the African Union, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and other institutions. She joined Maryland Carey Law from Osgoode Hall Law School. Before Osgoode, Professor Akande was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2019 to 2021. She has taught at Harvard Law School as a Clark Byse Fellow and at Northeastern University School of Law.
Professor Akande received her Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) degree from Harvard Law School in 2019 with her dissertation, "Navigating Entanglements: Contestations over Religion-State Relations in British Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1978," receiving the Law and Society in the Muslim World Prize. She obtained her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ibadan, graduating with First Class Honors and at the top of her class, and from the Nigerian Law School with First Class Honors.
Professor Akande's research has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US National Science Foundation (as part of a Law and Society Association International Research Collaborative), the Cravath International Research fellowship, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs fellowship, and the Harvard Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World research grant, among others.
She serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Law in Context. She co-chairs the American Society of International Law's Africa Interest Group and chairs the African Studies Association's Islam in Africa Study Group. She is also active in the American Society for Legal History and the Law and Society Association.