Leibniz Prize 2019 for Ayelet Shachar

Ayelet Shachar, Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity (MPI MMG), has been awarded the 2019 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for her groundbreaking work on citizenship and the legal frameworks of multicultural societies. Awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Leibniz Prize is Germany’s most prestigious research award, and it is endowed with up to 2.5 million EUR.

Shachar is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2001), for which she won the American Political Science Association 2002 Foundations of Political Theory Section Best First Book Award. This work has inspired a new generation of thinking about how to best mitigate the tensions between gender equality and religious diversity. It has also proved influential in the real world, intervening in actual public policy and legislative debates. It has been cited extensively, most recently, by England's Archbishop of Canterbury (who described Shachar's work as “highly original and significant”), Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General, and the Supreme Court of Canada.

Shachar's work combines “big ideas” from law and political theory with innovative problem-solving and institutional design. The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2009) was named 2010 International Ethics Notable Book in recognition of its “superior scholarship and contribution to the field of international ethics.” It has created a groundswell of interest among policymakers and academics alike. Located at the intersection of law, economics, and political philosophy, The Birthright Lottery crafts new legal concepts and innovative institutional designs to promote global justice, with the aim of ameliorating the most glaring opportunity inequalities that attach to this system of allocation in today’s world.


Further information:
Press release of MPI-MMG