At Hebrew University in Jerusalem, USC Gould professor will compare immigration policies
By Leslie Ridgeway
As the 2023-24 academic year gets underway, Dan Klerman, Edward G. Lewis Professor of Law and History at USC Gould School of Law, will conduct research at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel thanks to a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant award.
Klerman, who was a Fulbright Fellow as a law student at the University of Chicago, chose Hebrew University to gain insights and study data from scholars there who are researching the Israeli legal system on issues including settlement rates and immigration integration policies.
“Israel has a hybrid legal system that borrows elements from different parts of the world,” he says. “I want to note which aspects of these different legal systems lead to lower settlement rates. I have written several papers on settlement in U.S. and other parts of world.”
Immigration is a new area of research for Klerman. While at Hebrew University, he plans to compare Israeli immigration policies to U.S. immigration policies in hopes of determining ideal ways to integrate refugees into the population.
“Israel is fascinating for researching immigration, as it is primarily immigrants who arrived from other countries in the past century,” he said. “I want to see what policies there might reduce resentment from people already in the country.”
The Fulbright Senior Scholar award provides an important in-person opportunity to establish collaborations with Hebrew University academicians over four months, Klerman said.
“I’ve done cross-border collaboration on Zoom and written papers with people in the Far East and Europe that way, but with the nature of research, it’s important to be in a particular place to talk to people, and face-to-face is often the best way to generate ideas,” he said.
Klerman is the second USC Gould faculty member to win a grant from the Fulbright Foundation. Professor Hannah Garry, founding director of the International Human Rights Clinic, was awarded a grant in 2021 to study enforcement of international refugee law at the University of Oslo Law in Norway.
Klerman’s research has been interrupted by the conflict in the region, but he hopes to return to Israel in March 2024.
The Fulbright Scholar program is highly competitive, with an acceptance rate of under 20%.
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