New letters of the law

New areas of law come about only rarely. The core principles of contract law, tort law and criminal law have long outlived their earliest practitioners. Some areas of law, including, for example, financial regulation, have expanded greatly from a small seed of minor legal issues to a great hulking oak of law; others, such as the law of restitution, come into being from isolated legal issues coalescing into a single, coherent body of law. The process by which new areas of law are created is rarely, however, straightforward.

The same is true of Islamic finance law. Shari’a law, in and of itself, is certainly not new. As Lord Justice Potter observed in his significant speech in the decision of the Court of Appeal in Shamil Bank of Bahrain v Beximco Pharmaceuticals Ltd: “Most of the classical Islamic law on financial transactions is not contained as ‘rules’ or ‘law’ in the Qur’an and Sunnah but is based on the often divergent views held by established schools