Canadian Studies is pleased to announce that Ayelet Shachar, a legal scholar specializing in immigration, citizenship, and multiculturalism, has joined the program as our newest faculty affiliate.
Professor Shachar joined the Berkeley faculty last year as the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Chair in Comparative Law. She had previously held the R.F. Harney Chair in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto. She was also formerly a Scientific Member of Germany's Max Planck Society, and Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
Professor Shachar has published extensively on the topics of citizenship theory, immigration law, highly skilled migration and global inequality, multiculturalism and women’s rights, law and religion in comparative perspective, and the fraught relations between human rights law and territorial conceptions of sovereignty. She is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters, as well as several major books. Shachar’s research has received international acclaim, and informed key law and policy debates around the world. Her work has been cited by authorities from the Supreme Court of Canada to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Professor Shachar was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2014. In 2019, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Germany's most prestigious research award. Shachar is an Honorary Professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt Faculty of Law, and a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She received her BA and LLB from Tel Aviv University, and her LLM and JSD from Yale.