Professor Ran Hirschl delivers 17th Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Lecture

NUS Law hosted the 17th Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Lecture with Professor Ran Hirschl, from the University of Toronto, who delivered a public lecture titled, “Urban Agglomeration, Megacities, Constitutional Silence” on 9 September 2019. The lecture was followed by a question and answer session chaired by Associate Professor Jaclyn Neo ’03 (NUS Law).

Speaking to an audience made up of members from the law fraternity and students, Professor Hirschl spoke about urban agglomeration and the rise of megacities as one of the most significant geopolitical phenomena of our time. Strikingly, while it is appreciated by geographers, economists, and political theorists, the urbanisation trend is largely overlooked by jurists and constitutional thinkers. The gap is even more glaring when it comes to comparative constitutionalism. Despite the tremendous renaissance of comparative constitutional law, very few comparative studies trace the origins of constitutional innovation and stalemate with respect to city/state relations. In fact, the metropolis is virtually non-existent in comparative constitutional law, constitutional design, or constitutional thought.

The lecture, based on Professor Hirschl’s forthcoming book City, State: Comparative Constitutionalism and the Megacity (Oxford University Press, 2020), addressed these scholarly lacunae as it explored the challenges posed to the theory and practice of constitutional democracy in what has been hailed as the “century of the city.”

About the Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Programme

NUS Law established the Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Programme as one of several initiatives to pay tribute to the late Madam Kwa Geok Choo, wife of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew (LLD ’13 Honoris Causa). Under this programme, leading law academics are invited to teach a course at NUS and deliver public lectures on topical legal issues.

About the Speaker

Professor Ran Hirschl 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: Comparative Constitutionalism and the Megacity (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 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 over 100 articles and book chapters on constitutional law and its intersection with comparative politics.

Professor Hirschl has won academic excellence awards in five different countries; served as co-president of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S); and held distinguished visiting professorships at Harvard, Stanford, and NYU. His work on the intersection of social science and public law has been translated into various languages, discussed in numerous scholarly fora, cited by jurists and in high court decisions, and addressed in media venues from the New York Times to the Jerusalem Post. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC)—the highest academic accolade in that country.