- Senior Fellow -

Ayelet Shachar (Canada)
Professor, University of Toronto

Ayelet Shachar is assistant professor of law at the Faculty of Law University of Toronto.

She has written extensively on group rights, gender equality, citizenship theory, and immigration law. She is the author of the award-winning book, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her recent publications appear in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Harvard Civil-Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Political Theory, and NOMOS, as well as in several acclaimed edited volumes.

Professor Shachar holds degrees in law and political science, and master's and doctoral degrees in law from Yale Law School. She served as law clerk to Deputy Chief Justice (now Chief Justice) Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel. She was nominated a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton in 2000-2001.

Publication

Ayelet Shachar is an award-winning scholar and a leading expert on issues of group rights, gender equality, citizenship theory, and immigration law. She holds an LL.B in Law and B.A. in Political Science, summa cum laude ('93), from Tel Aviv University; LL.M. ('95) and J.S.D ('97), both from Yale Law School. Before arriving at Yale, she clerked for Deputy Chief Justice (now Chief Justice) Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel. Professor Shachar teaches at the Faculty of Law University of Toronto. She has been nominated Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for 2000-2001, and appointed Emile Noel Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law for Spring 2003.

Shachar's newly published book, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2001), was recently awarded the prestigious Best First Book Prize by the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association. The book offers a path-breaking approach to accommodating cultural differences while protecting individual rights, combining arguments from political theory with concrete suggestions for innovative legal-institutional design.

The book's contribution to the literature has been described by Michael Walzer in the following way: "Ayelet Shachar has written exactly the right sort of book about multiculturalism. She understands why parochial groups ought to be accommodated and why accommodating them can endanger their weakest members. Her realism in unblinking; her pragmatism is shrewd. She seizes brilliantly upon a lawyer's greatest advantage - her cases - and argues persuasively, from the cases, with many examples, for a system of divided jurisdiction that makes room for the groups and opens doors for their members." Martha Minow, in her praise of the book, writes: "How can distinctive cultures obtain respect and each woman and man also be assured liberty and equality? For an original and vital response reframing this issue, advocates, scholars, and policymakers should turn to Ayelet Shachar. She shows how policies protecting groups can harm individuals, and policies protecting individuals can harm groups; and she urges answers that seek simultaneously to enhance justice within groups and equality between them. Combining clarity of analysis, utter fairness, and vivid examples, Multicultural Jurisdictions could help countless women find freedom without having to exit communities that give them identity and meaning."

Although still early in her career, Professor Shachar is regularly cited as an authority on the normative and legal conflicts that may arise among individual rights, group traditions, and state laws, as well as on the complex relationship between feminism and multiculturalism. Her articles have been published in NOMOS, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Cardozo Law Review, Political Theory, as well as in several acclaimed edited volumes, including Multicultural Questions (Oxford, 1999), Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford, 2000), From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a Changing World (Brookings, 2000), and Breaking the Cycle of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair (Princeton, 2002). Her current research focuses on the philosophical foundations and distributive functions of citizenship, immigration and naturalization laws. She is currently completing a comprehensive manuscript on these issues for Cambridge University Press.