PUBLISHED:May 07, 2010

Horowitz awarded Woodrow Wilson Fellowship

Professor Donald L. Horowitz, the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science, has been awarded a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (the Wilson Center) in Washington, D.C., in order to advance his work on constitutional design for severely divided societies.

Horowitz will serve as a scholar in residence at the Wilson Center from Oct. 4, 2010 to June 30, 2011. It is the second time he has received the prestigious fellowship that funds projects relevant to governmental and public-policy problems. Horowitz previously served as a Wilson Fellow in 1971 and 1972, shortly after Center’s 1968 establishment, by an act of Congress, as a national monument to President Wilson, who believed in the connection between the world of scholarship and the world of public affairs.

“The Woodrow Wilson Center was an oasis of reflection in a sea of Washington immediacy,” Horowitz says. “I’m looking forward to again doing the kind of work that has a bearing on immediate problems, but isn’t the same work, exactly, as done by those charged with solving those problems on a day to day basis.”

Having already completed case studies on constitutional design in Northern Ireland, Fiji, Bosnia, and Cyprus, Horowitz plans to devote his fellowship to the analytical portion of an upcoming scholarly work.

“The experiments in constitutional engineering in those societies, and others such as Sri Lanka and Sudan, can give rise to cross-national conclusions. You can synthesize what’s been learned,” notes Horowitz. He also will undertake a review and analysis of such matters as the disparate electoral systems that can be used in such societies and survey the results that different systems have brought about.

Horowitz has consulted widely on institutions and policies that might be adopted to promote democracy and reduce ethic strife in conflict areas throughout the world; he recently attended meetings on the Kyrgyzstan constitution and has consulted on the Kenya constitution, both of which are in the process of design.

Having written extensively on the problems of divided societies and issues related to constitution building, Horowitz’ books include The Deadly Ethnic Riot (2001), Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985; 2d ed. 2000), and A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (1991), and he has published an extensive study of Islamic law and the theory of legal change.

Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, Horowitz recently completed a three-year term as president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. In 2009, he was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of the International Studies Association.

Horowitz will teach Labor Relations Law and his Comparative Constitutional Design seminar on a six-week accelerated timetable at the start of the Fall 2010 semester.