Professor Kristen Rundle
+61 3 8344 4883 | kristen.rundle@unimelb.edu.au | Room 0731B
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 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 major collections on key questions of public law and legal theory. She is also the co-author (with Peter Cane & Leighton McDonald) of the third editions of the Australian administrative law textbook and casebook, Principles of Administrative Law, and Cases for Principles of Administrative Law (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Kristen was awarded a SJD from the University of Toronto, where she also held the Doctoral Fellowship in Ethics at the Centre for Ethics. She undertook a LLM (honours) in public law and legal theory at McGill University as Australia's 2001 Lionel Murphy Postgraduate (Overseas) Scholar, and also holds a BA/LLB (first class honours) from the University of Sydney. Prior to becoming an academic, she worked as associate to Moore J at the Federal Court of Australia, and as a Legislative Policy Adviser at the New South Wales Attorney-General's Department. Kristen has participated in a range of Australian parliamentary inquiries relating to her areas of expertise, and has also been an active media commentator on questions of design and accountability in the contemporary Australian administrative state, with a particular focus on contracted-out government service delivery.
Teaching
The Melbourne JD
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)