David Abraham

Class of Spring 2010

Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law

University of Miami

Florida

The Boundaries and Bounds of Citizenship: Recognition and Redistribution in the US, Germany, and Israel

At the Academy in spring 2010, David Abraham undertook a comparative analysis of changes in the content of, access to, and significance of citizenship over the past three decades, resulting in a number of scholarly articles and chapters in edited volumes on immigration. Looking at the situation in the US, Germany, and Israel, he explored how each of these countries eased access to citizenship while limiting its intrinsic meaning as a guarantee of social solidarity. The study that resulted from his research has been of great value not only to legal scholars and social scientists, but also to those concerned with today’s most urgent policy tasks: the integration of diversity and the development of society in the era following the post-war welfare state.

David Abraham is a professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law specializing in property, immigration, and citizenship law, citizenship and identity, and law and transition to capitalism. A historian by training, he received a BA, an MA, and a PhD in history from the University of Chicago. He received a JD in 1989 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. After teaching for many years in the history department of Princeton University, he served as law clerk to Judge Leonard Garth of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and as an associate with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. He joined the Miami faculty in 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, and problems of Verrechtlichung.