Ran Hirschl

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. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/