Kerry Rittich
Professor
Cross Appointments: Faculty of Law
Email: kerry.rittich@utoronto.ca
Phone: 416-978-5259
Areas of Interest
- Critical legal theories and feminism
- Labour law
- International law and institutions
- Law and development
- Human rights
- Gender and critical theory
Biography
Kerry Rittich is a Professor at the Faculty of Law and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto and former Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law and Professor of Public Policy of Governance. She has published extensively in the areas of labour law, international law and global governance, law and development, and gender and critical theory, examining the social dimensions of globalization, the regulation of informal work, and the role of law in constructing boundaries between market and non-market work. Her current research examines the legal constitution of race and the uses of legal form to shape ‘free’ and unfree labour. With colleagues in Africa, Europe and North America, she is collaborating on an interdisciplinary project on gender and political economy.
Among her publications are Recharacterizing Restructuring: Law, Distribution and Gender in Market Reform (Kluwer Law International, 2002); (with Joanne Conaghan, University of Kent), Labour Law, Work and Family: Critical and Comparative Perspectives, (Oxford University Press, 2005); “The Future of Law and Development: Second Generation Reforms and the Incorporation of the Social” in David M. Trubek and Alvaro Santos eds., The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal (Cambridge University Press, 2006); “Black Sites: Locating the Family and Family Law in Development” and, (with Janet Halley), “Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law: Genealogies and Contemporary Studies of Family Law Exceptionalism”, American Journal of Comparative Law (2010); “Out in the World: Multilevel Governance for Gender Equality”, Ashleigh Barnes, ed., Feminisms of Discontent: Global Contestations (Oxford University Press, 2015); “Representing, Counting, Valuing: Managing Definitional Uncertainty in the Law of Trafficking”, P. Kotiswaran, ed., Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Trafficking, (Cambridge University Press, 2017); “Historicizing Labour and Development: Labour Market Formalization through the lens of British Colonial Administration”, inRe-Imagining Labour Law for Development (Hart Publishing, 2019).
Recent work includes: “Visibility and Value at Work: The Legal Organization of Productive and Reproductive Work”, Feminists@law (2023); “In the Middle of Things: The Political Economy of Labour Beyond the Market”, European Law Open (2023); “Labour and Labour Law in the Project of International Development” (with Diamond Ashiagbor), Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development (Oxford University Press, 2023); (with Libby Adler, et al) “Gender and Political Economy: Revisiting Distributive Analysis”, 49 Signs: Journal of Women and Culture (Summer 2024) and “Informal Labour through the Lens of TWAIL” (forthcoming in the Handbook on Third World Approaches to International Law, Elgar.
She obtained an LL.B. from the University of Alberta in 1992 and an SJD from Harvard University in 1998, and was a Law Clerk to Madame Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé at the Supreme Court of Canada. A Senior Faculty Member of the Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy, she has been a Jean Monnet fellow at the European University Institute, the Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University, Visiting Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Visiting Professor at Sciences Po Law School in Paris and Professor and Academic Co-Director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies, London.