Ayelet Shachar (LL.M., J.S.D, Yale Law School) is the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Chair in Comparative Law. She joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2023. Previously, she held the R.F. Harney Chair in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto. From 2015-2020, she was a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society - one of the foremost research organizations in the world - and Director at 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. Her teaching and research interests include law and religion, citizenship and immigration law and policy, comparative and international law, legal theory, and anti-discrimination law.
She is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters, as well as several major books. Her work has also proved influential in actual public policy and legislative debates. It has been cited by, among others, the Supreme Court of Canada, as well as England’s Archbishop of Canterbury (who described her work as “highly original and significant”).
In 2014, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada(opens in a new tab) (FRSC). In 2015, she became Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. In 2017, she was elected member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (past famous members include the Brothers Grimm and Gauss the mathematician). In 2019, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, one of Europe’s most prestigious research awards, for her groundbreaking work on citizenship and the legal frameworks of accommodation in multicultural societies.
