Weiner wins Grawemeyer world order prize

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Dec 01, 2014, 10:00 ET

LOUISVILLE, Ky., Dec. 1, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Understanding clan-based cultures is critical to the survival of modern democracies, says a legal historian who has won the 2015 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

Rutgers University law professor Mark S. Weiner earned the prize for ideas set forth in his book, "The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom."

Kinship-based groups exist today in many largely Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Societies based on tribal roots, they place collective strength above personal freedom – a clash that puts them in tension with liberal societies and causes them to resist "reform" by outside forces, Weiner says.

If clans and liberal societies are ever to share common ground, he argues, they first need to understand one another's legal and political traditions.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his Grawemeyer Award-winning book in 2013.

"Weiner offers a highly original explanation for why clan-based groups and democracies see personal freedom so differently, and he does a good job of explaining why it's important to maintain a strong liberal state to preserve liberty," said award director Charles Ziegler.

Sidney I. Reitman Scholar at Rutgers since 2006, Weiner began teaching constitutional law and legal history there in 2001. He also has been a visiting professor at University of Connecticut School of Law and Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law.

He holds doctorates in law and philosophy from Yale University, a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science History Association, Wesleyan University, New York University, Whiting Foundation, U.S. Department of Education and Yale.

Now on extended leave from Rutgers, he writes "Worlds of Law," a blog about global legal diversity, and this spring will be a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Salzburg, Austria.

Five Grawemeyer Award winners are being named this week. The university presents the prizes annually for outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology and education and gives a religion prize jointly with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

This year's awards are $100,000 each.

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SOURCE University of Louisville