Jackie Dugard

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. With a background in law and social sciences – BA (Hons) & LLB (Wits); MPhil & PhD (Cambridge); and LLM (Essex) – Dugard 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 gender-based violence. Her recent published articles include Water Rights Struggles in Johannesburg and Detroit Revisited: Looking Beyond Courts at the Politics and Power of Rights-Based Legal Mobilization in a Neoliberal Global Order: A ‘Powerpack’ Analysis. Between 2014 and June 2022, Jackie was an Associate Professor in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), where she taught Property Law, Jurisprudence and Bill of Rights, and where she is now a Visiting Professor. 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.