Ran Hirschl (1963-2026) was an Israeli-born Canadian political scientist and comparative legal scholar who held the David R. Cameron Distinguished Professorship of Law and Politics at the University of Toronto. He was known for work at the intersection of constitutional law and comparative politics, and coined the idea of hegemonic preservation, the theory that reforms shifting power from elected bodies to courts often reflect a deliberate strategy by political elites to protect their interests from democratic change. His first book, Towards Juristocracy (2004), examined how the judicialization of politics arises, and his later work addressed constitutional theocracy, comparative constitutional law and urban constitutionalism. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2014 and won the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research in 2021.
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Ran Hirschl was a political scientist and comparative legal scholar. He was the David R. Cameron Distinguished Professor of Law and Politics at the University of Toronto. Previously, he held the Canada Research Chair in Constitutionalism, Democracy and Development at the University of Toronto. He authored five major books and over one hundred and fifty articles on constitutional law and its intersection with comparative politics and society. In 2014, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2021, he was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research for his book City, State: Constitutionalism and the Megacity.
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