Madeline Wyse works on Rabbinic and Islamic legal literature, and particularly on the Talmud and uṣūl al-fiqh (often translated “Islamic legal theory”) as distinctive legal genres. She attends to how the texts of these corpora function as sites for working out hermeneutic, theological, philosophical and political questions, often in a creative and subversive manner. She is also interested in the historical development of these two literatures and the relation (or lack thereof) between these texts and the more “practical” realm of responsa/fatwa literature and legal manuals.