This award is presented bi-annually to honor distinguished lifetime contributions to the scientific study of justice and for efforts to advance justice as a field of study.

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Greeting of Leo Montada

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Laudatio for Leo Montada

Prepared by Manfred Schmitt

Presented at the 13^th Biennial Conference of the International Society for Justice Research in Banff, 2010

Dear colleagues and friends,

It is a great honour to introduce to you Professor Leo Montada, the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award winner of the International Society for Justice Research.

Leo Montada is Professor Emeritus at the University of Trier where he has taught and conducted most of his research since 1972.

Leo began his academic career at the University of Saarbrücken where he was a student of Psychology from 1957 to 1962. After his Diploma in Psychology, he moved to Berlin and became a doctoral student of Hans Aebli who himself had been a student of Jean Piaget.

In 1967, Aebli and Montada moved to Konstanz where Leo earned a degree as doctor of social sciences with a thesis on Piaget.

Thus, Leo can be considered an “academic grandson” of Jean Piaget. Given his academic ancestry, it is not surprising that Leo was primarily interested in developmental psychology at the beginning of his career. In fact, the nine books that he published between 1968 and 1985 were all devoted to various issues of developmental psychology.

Leo’s interest in life-span development has remained vivid until today, and he is still perceived by many colleagues and students in German speaking countries as a developmental psychologist. One reason for this perception is his famous and influential textbook “Entwicklungspsychologie” (developmental psychology) that he had created together with Rolf Oerter. The book was first published in 1982 and has been a bestseller since then. Thousands of students of psychology and other social sciences have acquired their knowledge of development psychology from this book.

Although Leo began his research career as a developmental psychologist, he has broadened the scope of his interests continuously and has contributed ideas, conceptual analyses, theoretical models, and empirical data to many other fields of psychology such as social, personality, educational, and clinical.

Leo’s scientific work has always been driven by his interest in fundamental psychological principles and his dedication to the application of scientific knowledge for the solution of real world problems. His theorizing and treatise of psychological phenomena and social issues was never limited by a particular scientific school or theoretical tradition. Rather, he relied on his outstanding conceptual repertoire, his thorough understanding of epistemic paradigms, his rich knowledge of empirical findings, and last but not least, his creative and sharp mind. For me, his analyses of social and psychological problems were always more thorough, comprehensive, and convincing than the more simplistic models I usually found in the literature.

Of the many social and psychological issues that have caught Leo’s attention, social justice has probably fascinated him the most. In fact, as you will learn from his presentation, he considers justice to be the key to both understanding and solving social conflicts of all sorts and on all levels of social interaction—that is, between individuals, between groups, and between societies. Most of Leo’s theoretical and empirical contributions to psychology deal directly or indirectly with justice. Leo has edited, authored, and coauthored:

• 31 books
• 84 journal articles
• 150 book chapters, and
• 64 published research reports
• which makes for a total of  329 publications

Of these many publications, more than 180 are devoted to justice. They cover a wide range of issues from various life domains such as:

• justice in trade
• justice in organisations
• justice in the labour market
• intergenerational justice
• justice in the use of natural resources
• justice in the distribution of duties and burdens among family members
• justice in health care and welfare systems
• global justice in the distribution of social and economic well being across countries and geographic regions

Not surprisingly, in light of these achievements, Leo has earned many highly prestigious awards for his distinguished contributions to science and academia. He is:

• a fellow of the Berlin Center for Advanced Studies
• a member of the Academia Europaea
• a winner, together with Melvin Lerner, of the Max Planck Research Award
• a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science
• a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the most prestigious German Academy, founded in 1652, and the counterpart of l’Académie Française
• a winner of the Franz Emanuel Weinert Award of the German Psychological Association

Of the many laudable contributions Leo has made to psychology and academia, I will finally mention those that have helped to establish our society and turn it from an informal group of dedicated justice researchers into a productive, visible, and successful research association:

Dear colleagues, it is with deep gratitude and great respect that the International Society for Justice Research grants Leo Montada the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award. The Society honours him for his distinguished contributions to social justice theory and research and thanks him for his persistent support of our society and our journal. We hope that Leo will continue to remind us that social justice is a more complex and more complicated matter than some of us believe or wish to assume.