hdurrani@fas.harvard.edu

Haris A. Durrani is a legal scholar and historian trained in law and engineering. His scholarship tackles law and technology—chiefly spaceflight and its governance—as tools of corporate power and extraterritorial projection.

His work spans patents, property, space law, public-private partnerships, U.S. foreign relations, and the histories of law and science. He is writing a book on law and communications satellites at the dawn of the Space Age. Satellite technology has long relied on corporations in pursuit of U.S. interests abroad, backed by federal dollars. The book unpacks legal instruments underlying these machinations, from contracts and patents to radio licenses and claims to orbital "real estate."

Previously, he served as a law clerk for Judge Jimmie V. Reyna of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He has received awards from NASA, the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, the Society for the History of Technology, and the Princeton School of International Affairs.

Durrani holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, where he was in the Program in History of Science and obtained a certificate from the Program in Latin American Studies; a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a James Kent Scholar and selected as a Tony Patiño Fellow; an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge; and a B.S. in Applied Physics from Columbia Engineering, where he was an Egleston Scholar.

He also writes fiction that blends themes from his scholarship with his experiences as a son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Pakistan. He is the author of Technologies of the Self and several short stories.