Fathers of Jurisprudence and the Orphaned Law
There are jurists who establish law, and there are fathers of jurisprudence. Fathers who do not merely guard the text, but shelter the school, its questions, its institutions, its teachers and its students. The jurist preserves the rule once it has settled; the father tends to the inquiry while it is still nameless, without an institutional home or a tradition to protect it.
In law, as in life and tribe, one sometimes belongs to a school before belonging to an institution; to a way of seeing a problem before belonging to a building that carries the name of a university or centre.
In days close together, I lost — as law itself lost — two men of this rare kind. In the East, Dr Mohammed Selim Al-Ghazwi passed away: the Jordanian constitutional jurist, former member of the Constitutional Court, and renewing dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Jordan; a man who saw the constitution as a living covenant of the state, not a closed document in the archive of authority.
And in the West, Sir Roy Goode passed away: founder of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS), at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the fathers of modern international commercial law; a man who made commercial law a language understood by the market, the state, the judge, and the legislator at once.
I do not write this as elegy alone. Many organisations, institutions, and distinguished figures across the world have already mourned him. I write also from the standpoint of affiliation. I am of the school of Sir Roy Goode: from its substance, its perspective, and its courage. A school that does not see excellence in repeating rules, but in pursuing problems before they become familiar: complex finance, cross-border insolvency, security interests, interlocking contracts, and international transactions that move one step — or more — ahead of the law.
Roy Goode was father to an institution, father to a method, and father to a practical jurisprudence which knew that law is not enough if it is merely beautiful in books; it must be fit for trust and for use, between state and capital, between court and legislator. His loss is therefore immense, not because he closed a door, but because he left behind a school capable of opening doors more difficult than those he himself confronted.
Today, law stands before one of its gravest challenges in many long centuries: that decision may be born from an algorithm; that sovereignty may migrate to the cloud; and that the true capacity to see and classify may rest in the hands of platforms that are not elected, and companies that are not held accountable as states are.
In my recent article in Defence Strategic Communications issued by NATO’s centre in Riga, I tried to name this wound: international law no longer fails because it is silent, but because it arrives late to a world whose algorithms have preceded it and imposed their rhythm. A state may raise its flag, yet it may not always possess the keys to data or the capacity to enforce in a space governed by technology companies that move across sovereignty.
Here law becomes threatened with orphanhood: texts remain, but without fathers to secure their lineage to a new reality.
That is why we do not need only jurists who explain what has passed. We need new fathers of jurisprudence, of institutions, and of usable law; men and women who see the problem before it becomes a dispute, and who shelter the orphaned questions in international law and artificial intelligence before their orphanhood comes to rule us.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and in the world it is tested.
Explanatory note: The reference is to the author’s article, “The Rupture of the International Rule of Law and the Rise of Tech Sovereignty”, published in Defence Strategic Communications, Volume 17, Spring 2026, issued by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, p. 141.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.