Tribute to ‘outstanding’ public-law career
Eminent political scientist and influential comparative legal scholar Ran Hirschl, who died on 19 May, has been announced as the first recipient of the ICON-S Award for Leadership in Global Public Law.
His wife Ayelet Shachar, also an eminent legal scholar at the University of Toronto, accepted the award on his behalf at the opening ceremony of the 2026 ICON-S conference in UCD on 29 June.
The International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) is the world’s largest and leading learned society for all areas of public law, including administrative law, constitutional law, and international law.
The executive committee has created the new award to recognise the outstanding career of a public-law scholar and their impact on academia, both as an institution builder and in making an important intellectual contribution.
Seminal work
Among Hirschl’s seminal works is Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law, which was published in 2014.
A founding member of ICON-S, he served as the co-president from 2015 to 2018.
“Ran was exceptionally open-minded. That was part of what Comparative Matters was about – making sure public law speaks to the world, but really in the most generous and open-minded way,” Shachar said at the ceremony.
“Ran really was fortunate because each of his books managed to change the discipline somewhat, and that is so rare.”
In his tribute to Hirschl, Sergio Verdugo, current co-president of ICON-S, said Comparative Matters put the tradition of comparative constitutional law into a wider historical and methodologically rich perspective.
Difficult field
“It has changed not only how we refer to our discipline today but how we do public-law scholarship. Comparative law has traditionally been considered a very difficult field to engage with, and there's a lot of poor comparative law being done there out today,” he said at the event.
“The same happens with empirical methods. Doing legal studies with empirical methods is very, very difficult. Both empirical legal studies and comparative law are fields where there is no academic consensus and methodological pluralism abounds.
“Perhaps one of the most important contributions Ran made to those fields was finding ways to make them easier and, at the same time, rigorous. This alone made a huge impact in terms of possibilities. Ran has given this field its sharpest questions, its better methods and one of its most welcoming homes in ICON-S.”
Creative
Verdugo, who is also associate professor of law (tenured) at the IE University Law School in Spain, described Hirschl as one of the “most important, impactful and creative scholars of comparative legal studies” that he had ever met.
“A true scholarly and institutional leader in public and comparative law, Ran developed many of the concepts and ideas that have become ubiquitous in the field today,” he said.
“He expanded legal research into empirical and interdisciplinary venues. He explored novel themes and educated generations of public-law academics, many of whom are today influential and excellent scholars in their own right.
“As a former ICON-S co-president, Ron expanded the society's reach beyond Europe and North America, transforming it into a broader global association.”