David Dyzenhaus is a professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He holds the Albert Abel Chair of Law and was appointed in 2015 to the rank of University Professor. He has taught in South Africa, England, Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, Hungary, Mexico and the USA. He has a doctorate from Oxford University and law and undergraduate degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
In 2014-15, he was the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor in Legal Science in Cambridge. In 2016-17, he was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2020-21, he was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In 2023 he was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Gold Medal, awarded to 'an individual whose sustained leadership, dedication and originality of thought have inspired both students and colleagues.' In 2024-25, he holds a Humboldt Research Award at the Free University, Berlin.
Professor Dyzenhaus is the author of Hard Cases in Wicked Legal Systems: South African Law in the Perspective of Legal Philosophy (now in its second edition), Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller in Weimar, and Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation and the Apartheid Legal Order. He has edited and co-edited several collections of essays. In 2004 he gave the JC Smuts Memorial Lectures to the Faculty of Law, Cambridge University. These were published by Cambridge University Press in 2006 as The Constitution of Law: Legality in a Time of Emergency. He is editor of the University of Toronto Law Journal and co-editor of the series Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law. His most recent book is The Long Arc of Legality: Hobbes, Kelsen, Hart (Cambridge, 2022).
