Overview
Donald L. Horowitz is the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus at Duke University. He holds law degrees from Syracuse and Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard. Professor Horowitz is the author of eight books: The Courts and Social Policy (1977), which won the Louis Brownlow Award of the National Academy of Public Administration; The Jurocracy (1977), a book about government lawyers; Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives: Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective (1980); Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985, 2000); A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (1991), which won the Ralph Bunche Prize of the American Political Science Association; The Deadly Ethnic Riot (2001); Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia, published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press and issued in a Bahasa Indonesia translation in 2014. His book, Constitutional Processes and Democratic Commitment, was published by Yale University Press in 2021. An edited volume on Electoral Reform and Democracy in Malaysia was published in 2023, and Professor Horowitz has a new book on federalism, regional autonomy, and ethnic conflict in press.
Professor Horowitz has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and at the Central European University, as well as a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, at the Law Faculty of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, at Universiti Kebangsaan in Malaysia, in the Academic Icon program at the University of Malaya, and in the Distinguished Visitor program in Political Science at the National University of Singapore and at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In 2017, he was a visitor at Nuffield College, Oxford, and in 2018, Visiting Research Professor at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies of the National University of Singapore. He has also served as Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, a Guggenheim Scholar, and a Carnegie Scholar. In 2009, he was presented with the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Ethnicity and Nationalism Section of the International Studies Association.
Professor Horowitz is currently writing a book about ethnic power sharing and constitutional design, particularly for divided societies, a subject on which he has advised in a number of countries. He also has been conducting research in ethnic politics and accommodation in Malaysia for several decades and has begun a book on that subject. He has been a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and a Siemens Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. Professor Horowitz delivered the Lipset Lecture in Washington and Toronto in 2013. He also gave the Corry Lecture at Queens University in Ontario in the same year. He has given keynote addresses and other named lectures at universities in the United States, Canada, Taiwan, India, England, Northern Ireland, Malaysia, and South Africa; and the Castle Lectures on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale.
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, Professor Horowitz served as President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy from 2007 to 2010. In 2011, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Flemish-speaking Free University of Brussels