Jackie Dugard

Senior Lecturer, Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR), Columbia University jd3903@columbia.edu; and Visiting Professor, School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand jackie.dugard@wits.ac.za

Jackie Dugard is a Senior Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Political Science of the Columbia University, USA. She is also a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa (Wits), where she used to teach Property and Constitutional Law. With a background in law and social sciences – BA (Hons) & LLB (Wits); MPhil & PhD (Cambridge); and LLM (Essex) – Jackie focuses on power and exclusion.

She has published widely on socio-economic rights (especially the rights to housing, land, and water), property law, access to justice, the role of law and courts in social change, protest and social movements, and climate justice. Her recent published articles include: J Dugard (2025) “Testing the transformative premise of the South African Land Claims Court: A comparison of Land Claims Court, Supreme Court of Appeal and Constitutional Court land rights’ decisions, 1996-2024” 15 Constitutional Court Review 429-454; J Dugard, L Cortes and A Cortes (2025) “Transformative Constitutionalism and Land Rights: South Africa and Brazil” 21 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 269-284; and J Dugard (2024) “Xolobeni’s struggle against patriracial-colonocapitalist mining in South Africa: A counterpoint to climate catastrophe?” 14(4) Wisconsin International Law Journal 551-576

Jackie was a co-founder and the first Executive Director of the non-governmental organization, Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), and the founding first Director of the Gender Equity Office (GEO) at Wits