Hafize Yazici
Thesis title: Roman Law and the Making of Modern Turkish Law: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Legal Reception, Codification, and Identity
PhD supervisors:
Background
Hafize has a background in law and legal scholarship, and is currently pursuing her PhD at Edinburgh Law School. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies in Edinburgh, she completed a previous PhD on Islam–Christian relations and Orientalism. In that work, she focused on the historical construction of knowledge about Islam within Western academic traditions.
She later continued to develop her research on Orientalism as a postdoctoral researcher in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has also worked in academia in Turkey as a research assistant, gaining both teaching and research experience. Her broader academic interests include legal history, comparative law, codification, legal transplants, and the transformation of legal systems, with particular attention to Ottoman and Turkish law.
Research summary
I am examining the formation of modern Turkish private law through the interrelated themes of legal reception, codification, and legal identity. My research focuses on the transformation from the Mecelle-i Ahkâm-ı Adliyye, often regarded as the first major Ottoman-Turkish civil codification, to the Turkish Civil Code and Code of Obligations of 1926. Rather than approaching this transformation as a simple and linear movement from Islamic law to secular law, or from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, I understand it as a layered legal-historical process involving continuity, rupture, adaptation, and selective legal reception.
A central question of my research is how the Mecelle and the 1926 Turkish Civil Code and Code of Obligations should be understood in terms of codification and legal reception. In this context, I ask whether the Mecelle should be seen merely as a modern compilation of classical Hanafi jurisprudence, as an example of European-style codification, or as a mixed legal text shaped by Islamic law, Ottoman legal practice, and European codificatory techniques. Similarly, I examine whether the 1926 codes should be understood only as a direct reception of Swiss law, or as part of a broader legal transformation involving both rupture from and continuity with the Ottoman legal past.
My research focuses particularly on the law of obligations, and more specifically on the concepts of offer and acceptance. Through these concepts, I explore how Islamic law, Roman law, French law, Swiss law, and Ottoman legal practice interacted, converged, and acquired new meanings in the making of modern Turkish law. The project also considers the role of courts, lawmakers, and codification commissions in shaping legal change. By reading the Mecelle and the 1926 codes together, I aim to contribute to wider debates on legal transplants, comparative legal history, Islamic law, Roman law, and the formation of modern legal identities.