Overview
Kristen Rundle joined Melbourne Law School in 2015 and teaches in the areas of administrative law and legal theory. She was the Co-Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies from 2017-2020. Kristen previously held appointments at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney, as well as adjunct, visiting and honorary appointments at the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria, the University of Ottawa, Erasmus University, and the Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University.
Kristen's research is located at the intersection of legal theory and public law in its effort to trace the conditions necessary for law to operate as a limitation on power. Led by her work in jurisprudence on the intellectual legacy of the legal philosopher, Lon Fuller, Kristen's interest in interactions between legal forms and human agency has also informed her ongoing research into questions of theory and practice arising from the neoliberal redesign of the contemporary administrative state, her scholarship on the connections between law and the Holocaust, and her work on the legal and institutional attributes of the British child migration program.
Kristen's book, Forms Liberate: Reclaiming the Jurisprudence of Lon L Fuller (Hart Publishing, 2012) was awarded the University of Melbourne Woodward Medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2017), and second prize, UK Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (2012). She was the first woman and the first Australian to be asked to deliver the prestigious Kobe Memorial Lecture in Legal and Political Philosophy, which she delivered in Kyoto, Japan, in July 2018. Kristen’s articles have been published in leading national and international law journals, including Law and Philosophy, the University of Toronto Law Journal, Jurisprudence, the Modern Law Review, and the Public Law Review, and her scholarly chapters have been published in leading collections on key questions of public law and legal theory. She is also the co-author of the third (2018) and fourth (2023) editions of the Australian administrative law textbook and casebook, Principles of Administrative Law, and Cases for Principles of Administrative Law (Oxford University Press). Most recently she is the author of the ‘Cambridge Element' (Philosophy of Law series), Revisiting the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a text designed to assist students of legal and political thought to navigate the unruly landscape of theoretical writing on the rule of law.
Other Faculty and University Responsibilities
- Convenor, Graduate Research Degree - Research Support Program (2021)
Memberships and Affiliations
Trustee, Lionel Murphy Foundation (2017 - )
Advisory Board, Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy (2015 - )
Editorial board member, Jurisprudence (2013 - )
Whitlam Fellow, The Whitlam Institute, University of Western Sydney (2015 - 2018)
Secretary, Australian Society of Legal Philosophy (2014 - 2018)