Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?

Wael Hallaq's Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?, published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 1984, is a peer-reviewed article that examined the classical Islamic legal literature directly and argued that no formal consensus ever closed the gate of independent legal reasoning, and that jurists continued to be recognized as mujtahids well after the point the closure narrative claims. Its strength is that it is grounded in the primary legal sources rather than repeating the received account. Its limit is that it is one influential article in an ongoing scholarly debate, so the traditional closed-gate narrative should not be repeated as settled fact, but Hallaq's revisionist reading should not be treated as unanimous consensus either.