Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Hussein, Nasser

Nasser was born in Karachi, Pakistan, on June 21, 1965: he died in November of 2015, four months after his fiftieth birthday.

Nasser came from distinguished stock. His father served as a captain in the Pakistani Navy and later as a government official. His mother hailed from a prominent family driven from northern India in the Partition, an experience that later informed Nasser’s scholarship. During Nasser’s childhood, the family spent three years in London, where his father served as an attaché, and his parents attended glittering diplomatic gatherings—his mother vividly recalls meeting the queen on more than one occasion.  Resettled in Karachi, Nasser attended the Karachi Grammar School, the oldest and most elite private school in Pakistan. He crushed his A-levels; a photo taken of Nasser when he was perhaps eighteen shows a thinly mustached youth with a vaguely supercilious expression and five or six academic trophies gathered in his arms. 

He left Karachi for Yale, where he majored in history, writing a thesis on Indian Muslim identity and the end of colonialism in the early twentieth century.  After Yale came his graduate training in history at Berkeley, where he wrote his dissertation under Tom Metcalfe on what ultimately became his book, The Jurisprudence of Emergency.   He received his Ph.D. in 1996 and promptly was hired here at Amherst on soft money from the Luce Foundation, with a joint appointment in the Departments of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought (LJST) and History.  At his job interview, sitting across from Martha at the old Classe Café, Nasser raised his eyebrows and muttered doubtfully,  “Cows…everywhere!”  For a time, he was lured away from Amherst to Cambridge and Harvard’s Society of Fellows, but two years of hobnobbing with Stanley Cavell and Leon Wieseltier proved enough, and he returned to the valley and LJST, where he successfully stood for tenure and ultimately became a full professor. He remained, though, a consummate cosmopolitan, traveling often to Karachi and London; still, he called the U.S. his home. He became a citizen in the U.S. District Court in Boston on August 18, 2011.

During his two decades at Amherst, Nasser made a number of pivotal scholarly contributions. Chief among these was his book The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law, published in 2003 by The University of Michigan Press. The book takes as its subject the extension of English law to English colonies. With India, Jamaica, and Ireland as his examples, Nasser lays bare how haphazardly the rule of law was introduced to the colonies but how, once installed, it mutated unpredictably, creating new legal concepts and forms that, ironically, ended up shaping metropolitan legal theory itself. Equal parts legal history and legal theory, The Jurisprudence of Emergency was the first book to use archival materials to document how a central axis of modern legal theory—the conflict between state power and legal authority—was defined by practices that emerged first in colonial settings.

Reviewers showered the book with praise. While perhaps unaware of Nasser’s charming, somewhat antiquarian habit of writing almost entirely by hand, reviewers expressed admiration for the grace, poise and economy of his writing.  More to the point, as a work of scholarship the book was hailed as brilliant, insightful, innovative, and groundbreaking. Paul Gilroy, an eminent cultural critic, judged Nasser’s book “a work of international significance….It is original in both its conception and its execution and [it] uniquely combines historical scholarship of the very highest standard with novel and provocative juridical, philosophical and political argument.” The decade that has elapsed since its initial publication has confirmed Gilroy’s early judgment.  Today The Jurisprudence of Emergency is regarded as an authoritative work, widely cited by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, in fields ranging from law and political science to English and history.

For many of us, publishing works of scholarship is like tossing rose petals off the Grand Canyon, as our precious objects disappear soundlessly into the void. Not so with Nasser. The Jurisprudence of Emergency had barely been a year in print when Nasser was contacted by a group of lawyers representing the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.  In challenging Bush administration arguments that habeas corpus relief was not available to extraterritorial detainees, the lawyers asked Nasser to clarify the common law history of habeas corpus in areas subject to the control but outside the territorial realm of the British Crown.  Through the winter months of 2003, Nasser worked the subject, ultimately becoming, along with a handful of other leading historians, a co-signatory of an Amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the cases of Rasul v. Bush and Al-Odah v. United States.  In 2004, in a landmark decision, the Court ruled that it had the authority to decide whether foreign nationals held at Guantanamo were indeed wrongfully imprisoned. Thus, it was that the young assistant professor who had recently turned his dissertation into a book saw his book help guide the jurisprudence of the very highest court in the land.

Dedicated, then, to deploying legal history as a means of making sense of the disputes of the present, Nasser sought in recent years to study the contemporary law of armed conflict through the filter of colonial precedents.  Disturbed by Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the ensuing occupation, Nasser set to work on this project with a series of articles on the so-called “War on Terror.” Beginning with a highly original essay in Critical Inquiry on indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, Nasser challenged the prevailing scholarly attacks on Bush practices, which focused on their alleged “extra-legality.”  By contrast, Nasser’s critique was altogether more radical, as it insisted that Bush’s practices represented the advent of what he called “hyperlegality”—the subsumption of all surveillance, interrogation and combat practices under a seamless architecture of legal justification. Later articles would apply this argument to theories of counterinsurgency in Iraq and drone warfare in Pakistan.  Together these pieces were to have comprised a second book, which at the time of Nasser’s death was under contract with Cornell University Press and bore the title, “War by Every Other Name: colonial war, contemporary conflicts and modernity.”

In addition to his systematic inquiries into colonial and postcolonial legal history, Nasser co-authored one of the first reviews in English of the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. With Austin, he co-authored two articles about the relationship between mercy and the rule of law, and also co-edited two books, one on questions of forgiveness and another on the question of how governments that break the law are to be held accountable.

We could go on, but an inventory of Nasser’s published work fails to do full justice to the quality of his mind.  A visitor to Nasser’s office, secluded in the warren-like bowels of Clark House, where Nasser would sneak the occasional puff of the cigarettes he could never quite live without, would have noticed shelves cluttered not only with treatises on Roman Law and Islamic Law, not only with the works of H.L.A. Hart, Arendt and Foucault but also with heavily creased copies of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen and Art Spiegelman. Nasser was passionate about the poetry of W.H. Auden, whose enigmatic poem “Law, Like Love” held a special fascination for him. He long harbored the desire to write about Auden and on the question of poetry and law. Few of his friends will ever be able to read Auden’s poem again without feeling his eyes looking at it too, without finding themselves wondering what it was that he wanted to say about it. We will, in any case, never know. Many of us know the pain of living, sometimes for long periods of time, with our own unfinished work. Now we know a different heartache as well.

That quality of mind—at once intellectually generous and profoundly unsentimental; committed and impious; equally alert to the world’s beauty as to its absurdity—drew students to Nasser.  His courses addressed some of the largest questions we can ask of law:  what is its relation to the sacred?  How is it constituted in its relation to history and historical thinking?  Can law serve as a meaningful check on the exercise of armed conflict? How does law function in an age of globalism?  He translated those difficult conceptual questions into gripping classroom encounters with our students.  Teaching with Nasser was like traveling to a new city with a streetwise friend who knew the terrain intimately but who self-effacingly always drew attention to the unfamiliar. He could generate feelings of discomfort in his students as he would ask a seemingly straightforward question, patiently accept the answer, only then to ask “But don’t you think …?”—suddenly opening a simple claim onto a much more complex inquiry. He had opinions and asserted them; in our co-taught course on “Law and War,” he would merrily attack Lawrence as a “lapdog of liberal neo-imperialism, a defender of phallic eurocentrism.” But however political he was never doctrinaire in his positions; his sensibility always pulled away from grand claims and toward the local, the contingent and the overlooked.  Students adored him. “His classes,” one student wrote, “will spark interest in even the most bored of souls.  Do not miss a chance to soak up this professor's genius.”  Another also used the “g-word”: “serious head candy, combined with serious overall candy:  every class was a major sugar rush. He's a genius, really.”  Steve Vladek, a former student and now a prominent legal scholar in his own right, describes his study with Nasser as a “life-changing experience”—“he opened my eyes to the transformative potential of law.”

Nasser was more than a great teacher and colleague.  He was a friend. We in Clark House looked forward to his dog Buddy, a mutt whose short legs and sturdy muscular frame was not unlike his master’s body type, nosing his way into our offices followed by Nasser himself, dressed either in black Hugo Boss blazer and Hermès tie or, if not teaching, in t-shirt and sweat pants, beginning many a conversation with: “Hey honey, how’re things going?” or “Tell me honestly, am I morbidly obese?” We looked forward to seeing him in the gym, which he visited at times twice a day, pedaling away on the Life Cycle, listening to Amy Winehouse on his earbuds and flipping through the pages of Entertainment Weekly, to which he religiously subscribed.  And we looked forward to his gossip.  And his gossip.  And his gossip.

But however wicked his wit, he was incapable of being mean-spirited.  He had a gift for true friendship—he knew how to reach out in the right way at the right time.  He knew Lawrence was feeling melancholy at the prospect of taking his older son off to college and wrote the following email on the eve of Jacob’s departure.  “Have a lovely, sad, life-affirming day on Saturday. I'll be thinking of you (you phallic Eurocentric pig).  Xoxoxoxo”

He was a friend who had insight into the lonely struggles that come with private tragedy, ready to loan his ear, his apartment, and his time. Tom recalls:

He was, in his matter-of-fact way, always there to remind me, when I had one of the largest challenges of my personal life in caring for a family facing the trauma of loss, that the caregiver must also care for himself. He did this with a light hand, checking in once in a while, suggesting dinner after my young kids had settled down for the evening. I remember, in particular, a time he volunteered to stay with my ten-year-old son when I had to leave town for the evening. They ended up watching soccer through the night – way past my son’s bedtime—and for their evening meal, spread newspaper on the floor, and ate takeout fried chicken with their bare hands. This elegant, meticulously dressed cosmopolitan sat on the floor and pigged out with a ten-year-old.

Austin recalls:

If anyone needed something, Nasser was the first to offer help. And the first to carry through on his offers.  I vividly remember a very rainy Saturday in Boston’s Back Bay not long after Nasser started at Amherst when he volunteered to help move my daughter Emily into her new apartment. He came and stayed until everything was moved in and then left drenched without a complaint. A few years later, I organized a conference on the Killing State in the late 1990s. Nasser presented an extraordinary paper on clemency in capital cases. The next day, he came to my office with a file filled with his notes. He put it on my desk and said, “I want you to have this. I think you will do a better job with it than I can.” He insisted that I keep it and use it. That was Nasser, an unusually generous friend and colleague, willing to share his ideas rather than to horde them.

Just before the sudden onset of sepsis, in May 2014, that ultimately took his life, Nasser had tattooed on his shoulder a line from Auden’s poem “Precious Five”:  “Bless what there is for being.”  The full stanza reads:

That singular command I do not understand,   
Bless what there is for being,   
Which has to be obeyed, for   
What else am I made for,   
Agreeing or disagreeing?

By the end of his time at Amherst Nasser had stopped worrying about the strangeness of cows, finally settling into this landscape.  He planned a course on animals and biopolitics, took in strays (some human), and, to our astonishment, openly pondered retiring to a farm to care for abandoned horses.  He joined his brother Omar in mentoring—and choosing the proper fabulous clothing for—his niece Iman and nephew Saif, who have now headed to college.  In recent years, he returned, again and again, to care for his father and his beloved mother, Sultana, in their household in Karachi, and he found happiness settling into a vibrant and caring community in Boston and Provincetown with his partner Jim Milke.   

We cannot end without noting how much Nasser would have hated this tribute. He shunned cameras, declined praise, ducked the limelight, and generally worked to train the spotlight on those around him. But our true regret comes not in paying tribute to this gifted scholar and teacher and dear friend, but in knowing that our tribute came so very prematurely.

We request that this memorial minute be entered into the records of the college and that a copy be sent to Nasser’s family.

Respectfully submitted,

Lawrence Douglas, chair   
Thomas L. Dumm   
Austin Sarat