Sahar Maranlou – författare

Online Justice Seeking and Law Reform in Iran: Post to Change offers a socio-legal study of how Iranian women use social media and online platforms to interpret law, express legal needs, challenge gender inequality, and demand justice. Focusing on women’s personal status laws, the book examines how public perceptions of marriage, family law, compulsory hijab, sexual harassment, and sexual violence are shaped and contested in Iran’s digital public sphere.Drawing on netnographic research, case studies, online legal enquiries, court judgments, and social media campaigns, Sahar Maranlou explores how women use online spaces to access legal information, build solidarity, narrate injustice, and pressure the justice system towards greater gender sensitivity. The book pays particular attention to campaigns around child marriage, forms of marriage, #MeToo, and hijab law, showing how online justice seeking connects everyday legal experiences with wider demands for law reform.Rather than treating social media only as a tool of activism or resistance, this book examines it as a site of public legal culture, legal empowerment, and socio-legal transformation. It argues that, despite barriers to formal reform, online platforms have opened new possibilities for women’s access to justice in Iran’s plural legal system.

This book offers a critical and in-depth analysis of access to justice from international and Islamic perspectives. Existing Western models have highlighted the mechanisms by which individuals can access justice; however, access to justice incorporates various conceptions of justice and of its users. This book evaluates the historical development of the justice sector in Iran and discusses issues including the performance of the justice sector, judicial independence, efficiency and accessibility, and normative protection, together with an analysis of barriers. It explores the legal empowerment of users, with a specific focus on women, and presents the findings of a survey study on the perceptions of Iranian women. This study is designed to focus on women's basic legal knowledge, their familiarity with legal procedure, perceptions of cultural barriers, issues that influence their preference for mechanisms of formal or alternative dispute solutions, and their level of satisfaction with their chosen courses of action.