Includes bibliographical references (pages 393-401) and index.

Introduction -- The epiphany of Saudi Law -- Blackletter Law : a primer on courts, format, evidence, sources -- Civil law I. Contracts -- Civil law II. Torts -- Criminal law I. Procedure and hadd -- Criminal law II. Ta'zir and 'everything else' -- Family law. The Saudi Hanbali exception -- Real property -- Diwan al-mazalem : a court for all seasons -- From Diwan al-mazalem to commercial courts : a unified theory of remedies -- Companies and corporate governance -- Insolvency, bankruptcy, the stock market -- Constitutional law -- Human rights -- Epilogue.

"At the turn of the 20th century, a minor principality with a kingly ambition emerged from the victorious occupation of the strategic town of Riyadh by a small group of warriors led by a young man, 'Abd al-'Aziz ibn 'Abd al-Rahman Al Faysal Al Sa'ud. In the qualification of the city-oasis - riyad in Arabic is plural for rawda, green pasture, meadow, orchard - the word 'strategic' is retrospective. No one paid attention to yet another raid in the middle of the Arabian desert - a ghazwa, the tribal conquest of time immemorial. The raiders were local protagonists, according to Saudi lore some sixty members of the followers of ibn Saud, as he became known in the West many years later, battling their Rashid rivals whom they dislodged from the oasis and its surroundings. It seemed then to be the continuation of a small, insignificant turf war between tribal protagonists who had been at it for at least two centuries"--