Ran Hirschl

Professor of Political Science and Law, University of Toronto Faculty of Law

Regional Focus: Global
Date of Presentation: Session 8, TBD

Biography: 

Ran Hirschl (PhD, Yale University) is Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Toronto, holder of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship in Comparative Constitutionalism at the University of Göttingen, and head of the Max Planck Fellow Group in Comparative Constitutionalism. He is the author of several major books, including City, State: Constitutionalism and the Megacity (Oxford University Press, 2020); Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 APSA Herman Pritchett Award for the best book on law and courts; Constitutional Theocracy (Harvard University Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 Mahoney Prize in legal theory; and Towards Juristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2004), as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters on constitutional law and its intersection with comparative politics and society. Professor Hirschl has won academic excellence awards in five different countries, been awarded fellowships at Stanford and Princeton, and held distinguished visiting professorships at Harvard, NYU and NUS. In 2014, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC)—the highest academic accolade in that country. The official citation describes him as “one of the world’s leading scholars of comparative constitutional law, courts and jurisprudence.”