Professor Shai Lavi

Executive Director
Van Leer Jerusalem Institute

Shai Lavi is Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and professor of law at Tel Aviv University. He earned his first and second degrees in law and sociology at Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. in law from the University of California, Berkeley. His research combines insight from sociology, legal theory, and philosophy to study bioethical issues from historical and contemporary perspectives. Specifically, he studies the use of technology at the beginning and end of life. After studying the cultural history of dying in the United States, regulation of beginning of life in Israel, and animal slaughter in Germany, he is currently engaged in a comparative research – in Germany, Turkey, and Israel –on issues related to legal regulation of the body and the tension between religion and secularity. His book on the end of life, The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States, won the 2006 Sociology of Law Distinguished Scholarly Book Award of the American Sociological Association. Prof. Lavi has received a Fulbright Fellowship, the Zeltner Prize for young scholars in law, a grant to establish the Minerva Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the End of Life, and a research grant from GIF, the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development, to study bioethics and society in Israel, Turkey, and Germany. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yeshiva University in New York, and Humboldt University of Berlin.