Ayelet Shachar is a professor of law, political science, and arts and science at the University of Toronto. She received her JSD from Yale Law School in 1997. Prior to that, she served as law clerk to former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. She joined the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1999.

Shachar is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights, winner of the 2002 Best First Book Award by the American Political Science Association, Foundations of Political Theory Section. She is recipient of many academic awards and fellowships, including, most recently, Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, the Connaught Research Fellowship in Social Sciences at the University of Toronto, and the Emile Noel Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law.

Her scholarship focuses on citizenship and immigration law, highly skilled migrants and transnational legal processes, as well as state and religion, family law, multilevel governance regimes, group rights, and gender equality.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, Stanford Humanities Center, and Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop).

Rami Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune. He is an internationally syndicated journalist, author, and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He is currently a visiting fellow with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

Mr. Khouri will speak about the war in Lebanon this summer. He will provide an analysis of the Israeli-Hezbollah war and discuss its fallout for Lebanese society and government, and its impact on the region's power dynamics. He will also comment on escalating violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and heightening tensions between the U.S. and political movements in the region, including Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

One of the most unexpected changes of the 1990s was that firms in a number of emerging economies not previously known for high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new information technologies (IT). Surprisingly, from the perspective of comparative political economy theories, the IT industries of these countries use different business models and have carved out different positions in the global IT production networks. Of these emerging economies, the Taiwanese, Israeli, and Irish have successfully nurtured the growth of their IT industries.

Breznitz argues that emerging economies have more than one option for developing their high technology industries. His research shows how state actions shaped the structure of these three IT industries and that the industry's developmental path was influenced by four critical decisions of the state. His work provides a basis to advance a theoretical framework for analyzing how different choices lead to long-term consequences and to the development of successful and radically different industrial systems.