May 29, 2009 — Coral Gables — University of Miami Law Professor David Abraham was awarded a highly prestigious fellowship from The American Academy in Berlin for the spring 2010 semester. Professor Abraham was one of 24 American fellows selected, and the first UM faculty member to be awarded this fellowship. During his time in Berlin, Germany, Professor Abraham will be analyzing the declining boundaries and bonds of citizenship in the U.S., Germany, and Israel over the past three decades.
Professor Abraham’s research project will focus on citizenship. According to Abraham, there has been an overall decline in the content of citizenship and an easing of access to it. Rights struggles have focused on individual equal protection rights and on multiculturalism. The decline of the Keynesian welfare state and the Soviet Union and the rise of international human rights discourses have also played their parts. The result has been a gain in recognition and non-discrimination, but at the expense of redistribution. His project will document the forces to which all three societies have been subjected.
A Professor of Law at the University of Miami since 1991, Abraham has published widely on issues of politics and economics in Weimar Germany and is the author of The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, which examined the conditions and fate of a social-democratic, class-compromise effort to establish a viable welfare state. More recently, he has written on American labor law, property law, immigration and citizenship law, and problems of Verrechtlichung.
The American Academy in Berlin is a private, non-profit center for German-American cultural exchange. Its fellowship program promotes advanced research in a variety of academic, cultural, and political affairs. Established in 1994, its primary goal is to foster greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and the people of Germany. Academy fellows are comprised of established and emerging scholars, writers, and professionals who wish to engage in independent study. The fellowships have been awarded to historians, economists, filmmakers, art historians, journalists, legal scholars, linguists, musicologists, public policy experts, and writers, among others.
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The University of Miami School of Law’s mission is to foster the intellectual discipline, creativity, and critical skills that will prepare its graduates for the highest standards of professional competence in the practice of law in a global environment subject to continual ― and not always predictable ― transformation; to cultivate a broad range of legal and interdisciplinary scholarship that, working at the cutting edge of its field, enhances the development of law and legal doctrine, and deepens society’s understanding of law and its role in society; and to fulfill the legal profession’s historic duty to promote the interests of justice. http://www.law.miami.edu.
