Prof. Ayelet Shachar

Ayelet Shachar is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG), where she heads the Ethics, Law, and Politics Department. Before joining the Max Planck Society, Shachar held the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Multiculturalism at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and was also the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School and the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. She earned her LL.M. and J.S.D from Yale University. She has been a Fulbright Fellow at Yale Law School, Emile Noël Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law, and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She is currently an elected board member of five peer-reviewed journals, as well as lead editor of the recently published Oxford Handbook of Citizenship. Shachar has delivered keynotes and public lectures across the globe, and has provided pro-bono expert consultation to judges, governmental commissions and the World Bank, as well as non-governmental organizations specializing in citizenship, immigration and religious toleration. Her work has proven influential in public policy debates. It has been cited, for example, by England’s Archbishop of Canterbury and the Supreme Court of Canada. In 2014, she was peer-elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) – the country’s highest academic accolade. She joined the Max Planck Society as Director and Scientific Member of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in 2015, and in 2017, she was named a Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen) – the oldest academy of sciences and humanities in Germany.