Remembering Ran Hirschl

Mark Graber

[For a memorial celebration of Ran Hirschl's life and scholarship at the University of Toronto, November 6, 2026.  Updated version of what I published earlier in Balkinization, but worth sharing, particularly because I was unable to be physically pressent for the event]

Ran Hirschl was a pathbreaking scholar, an even better human being, and an even better friend.  Words cannot capture his impact on scholarship and on the lives of the numerous scholars he touched.  These excerpts from a letter on his behalf for a lifetime achievement award are a weak attempt to do justice to him and his legacy.  My comments remain in the present tense because through his works, example, and encouragement, Ran will always be with us. His scholarship and influence lives in our scholarship to the point where we will often not be able to distinguish where his thought ends and ours begins.

Hirschl is the leading thinker on comparative constitutionalism in the world.   No political scientist in the public law field, no political scientist in the comparative government field, no law professor, and no member of any other discipline has come close to his achievements.  Each of Professor Hirschl’s books is acknowledged as path-breaking.  No one knows more about constitutional developments in different parts of the world.  No one has done more to inspire the contemporary renaissance in comparative constitutionalism.  No one has played a greater leadership role in this comparative constitutionalism revival.  You could divide Hirschl’s resume in half and probably thirds and each partition would have a powerful case for a lifetime achievement award in numerous disciplines and in numerous fields within those disciplines.

Hirschl has a stunning range of expertise, a range that dwarfs any other scholar that I know of in political science or law.  One finds in his publications a sophisticated understanding of political theory, all aspects of public law, and comparative politics.  He has mastered the literature on democratic theory, on constitutional interpretation, on law and society, and on judicial politics.  He is the master of the general literature on comparative constitutional law and the specific constitutional politics of almost every country with constitutional politics.  His chapter on case studies in Comparative Matters is an extraordinary methodological piece, one I regular insist my students examine.   Hirschl’s capacity to know both the details of what almost every constitutional court in the world is doing and to organize those details into theoretically rich arguments is remarkable.  Maybe somewhere in an obscure province in India, high in the Andes mountains, or ten miles west of Victoria Falls, a constitutional development exists that Hirschl does not know about.  But neither I nor any of the numerous reviewers of his works identified this omission.  I am confident Vulcan of Star Trek fame is fiction, because Professor Hirschl has never discussed the Constitution of Vulcan.

His erudition extends far beyond law and political science.  Consider the first chapter of City, State: The Constitutionalism and the Megacity.  The chapter begins with an extensive discussion of what almost every social science field has said about cities for the past fifty years.  Hirschl demonstrates a fluency in subjects ranging from sociology to architecture that would do experts in those field proud.  Perhaps I need to get out more, but I cannot think of a scholar in any field whose expertise ranges over so much political science, so much law and so much scholarship as Professor Hirschl.  The other books are similar.  Hirschl does not simply master law and political science.  He masters whatever disciplines are necessary to cast light on his subject matters.

Professor Hirschl’s forthcoming book, Constitutionalism 2050, points out that the traditional nation-state no longer serves to manage central problems.  The problems regimes face, from climate change to globalization to pandemics are now international.  Local national governance, he observes, weakens human capacity to respond to these problems.  Constitutionalism must go global for the human race to survive.  Putting aside jealously, I had two thoughts when he was presented.  First, that he was again forcing scholars to think anew about constitutionalism and, second, there would be another award winning book in a few years.  If you wanted me to predict what living senior scholar would writing another award winning book in the 2030s, Professor Hirschl would be my response.

Professor Hirschl is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, which is the equivalent of being a member of the American Academic for the Arts and Sciences in the United States (both are academic halls of fame).  He has held distinguished chairs at the University of Toronto, the University of Texas, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, as well as holding distinguished visitor chairs at the National University of Singapore, New York University and Harvard Law School.  He has won national and global awards for scholarship and delivered addresses, often named, at almost every major university in the world.  He is a former Co-President of the International Society of Public Law and one of the founders of that organization.  He has published many edited collections and nearly one-hundred essays, many of which have been republished and translated elsewhere.  The evidence clearly indicates, I should add, that none of his works seem to have been written by Christopher Marlowe.

Professor Hirschl excels at all facets of the academy.  He was an award-winning teacher at Toronto.  When I wrote his recommendation for the Canada Research Chair, the University of Toronto presented me with as strong a set of teaching evaluations, both for graduate students and undergraduates, as I recall seeing.  He has helped mentor the younger generation of comparativists.  You see Professor Hirschl’s name in manuscripts by junior scholars warmly thanking him for the time and energy he gave to reviewing junior manuscripts.  He has been a leader in comparative constitutionalism, not just as a scholar, but as a founder and leader of the International Society of Public Law.  Thanks in significant part to his efforts, ICON-S is probably the most important site in the world for comparative constitutionalism.  Finally, on a personal note he is a warm and trusted friend to many of us in the academy.

Professor Hirschl has a global reputation for excellence and as fine a global reputation for decency.  He is an outstanding teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend.

As is appropriate for a lifetime achievement award letter, I did not discuss my personal relationship with Ran.  He was the ultimate mensch.  Ran was a source of many ideas and a cheerleader throughout.  The paper I plan to contribute to the volume we are presenting in his honor has three substantive themes.  First, The newest constitutionalism being developed by such distinguished scholars as Tom Ginsburg, Aziz Huq, David Landau, and Rosalind Dixon is another instance of hegemonic preservation.  Second, hegemonic preservation is an empirical judgment that elites are seeking to entrench certain values in light of threats from rival coalition, not a normative attack on this political strategy.   Third, too often attempts at hegemonic preservation risk substituting constitutional law substitutes for political mobilization.  I suspect some of you are thinking, this is Ran’s voice, not yours. 

Guilty with explanation.  As I noted at the beginning of this talk, when commenting on the political construction of judicial power, I can no longer tell when Ran’s thought begins and my thought ends.  I can say with confidence that none of these ruminations, particularly ruminations that are not simply US centric, would have been possible in the absence of Ran’s scholarship, mentorship, and friendship.  My only defense is that much of my work is best thought of as Mark Graber/Ran Hirschl or, really, Mark Graber/Ran Hirschl/Rogers Smith/Sandy Levinson/other people inside and outside of this room.  I suspect others might describe their work similarly.  Ran insisted that his work was Ran Hirschl/Ayelet Shachar or, really, Ran Hirsch/Ayelet Shachar/Tom Ginsburg/others inside and outside of this room.  The lesson may be that while identifying the scholarly contributions of a distinctive scholarly community is easy, identifying the particular contribution of any scholar is next to impossible.  Ran Hirschl made enormous contributions to the stock of ideas that are now the common property of our community, even if none of us can claim that any unique parcel is distinctively ours.