Kristen Rundle

Kristen Rundle joined Melbourne Law School in 2015 and teaches in the areas of administrative law and legal theory. She became the Co-Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies in December 2016.

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, Erasmus University, the University of Ottawa, 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 act as a limitation on power. Led by her work in legal philosophy 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 the connections between law and the Holocaust, her work on the legal and institutional attributes of the British child migration program, and her ongoing inquiry into questions of theory and practice arising from the neoliberal redesign of the administrative state, especially with respect to contracted-out public functions.

Kristen's book, Forms Liberate: Reclaiming the Jurisprudence of Lon L Fuller (Hart Publishing, 2012) was awarded second prize, UK Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (2012), and the University of Melbourne Woodward Medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2017). In July 2018 she was the first woman and first Australian to deliver the prestigious Kobe Memorial Lecture in Legal and Political Philosophy in Kyoto, Japan. Kristen is the co-author (with Peter Cane & Leighton McDonald) of the third editions of the leading Australian administrative law textbook and casebook, Principles of Administrative Law, and Cases for Principles of Administrative Law (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her articles have been published in leading international journals, including Law and Philosophy, the University of Toronto Law Journal, the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy, Jurisprudence, and the Modern Law Review.

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, Kristen 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.