Professor Kristen Rundle

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 New York University Law School (Hauser Global Visiting Faculty 2024), the Center for Transnational Legal Studies, London, 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. Informed 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 shaped her ongoing research into the question of what it is to be a subject of law rather than mere power, and her investigation of questions of theory and practice concerning how administrative state actors discharge their responsibilities in conditions of neoliberal and managerial government.

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 is the author of the Cambridge Element' (Philosophy of Law series), Revisiting the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a short book designed to assist students of legal and political thought to navigate the unruly landscape of theoretical writing on the idea of the rule of law'. In 2026 she joined Professor Jeremy Waldron (NYU) as co-author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on 'The Rule of Law'.

Kristen's articles have been published in leading international and national 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, including The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (Jens Meierhenrich & Martin Loughlin eds, 2021). She is also the co-author of the Oxford University Press Australian administrative law texts, Principles of Administrative Law and Cases for Principles of Administrative Law (with Peter Cane & Leighton McDonald, 2018; with Leighton McDonald & Emily Hammond, 2023 & 2027). In 2023 Kristen launched her 'Executive Branch Research Lab', a JD elective unit that sees participating students assist under-resourced legal and social sector organisations through targeted research on the complex forms of administrative power encountered daily in Australia today.

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)