Nurfadzilah Yahaya's lecture examines how Islamic law was transformed during the nineteenth century across the world, especially by looking at Waqfs.

Nurfadzilah Yahaya traces how colonial institutional frameworks built enduring juridical, territorial, and extractive architectures that decisively transformed societies and still influence contemporary relations between communities, resource access, and state power.

Her first book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and the Arab Diaspora in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020), examines how Arab commercial elites maneuvering within British and Dutch legal frameworks helped define imperial sovereignty. Their strategies to safeguard international family estates through colonial judicial systems dissolved boundaries between private agreements and public law, creating jurisdictional spillover where subjects pursuing legal security unintentionally expanded imperial control.