Jackie 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, Columbia University. She is currently part of a multi-country Research Council of Norway-funded project, “
Pluriland”, which seeks to understand the impact on human security of enacting plural land rights in constitutions and law. Jackie is the leader of the workstream on Land and Housing for the UN-funded project, “Making Prevention a Reality: A Framework Approach”. Together with a colleague from the University of the Witwatersrand, Joel Quirk, Jackie is editing a forthcoming special issue of the
South African Journal on Human Rights (SAJHR) on Gender-Based Violence at universities.
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 gender-based violence. Jackie is the lead co-editor (Jackie Dugard, Bruce Porter, Daniela Ikawa and Lilian Chenwi) of Edward Elgar’s (2020)
Research Handbook on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights. Her recent published articles include: Jackie Dugard (2022) “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”,
Journal of Human Rights Practice; and Jackie Dugard (2021) “Evaluating transformative constitutionalism in South Africa: A view from the mineral rights adjudication looking glass”,
39 Nordic Journal of Human Rights 373-390.
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. She is a Global Fellow at the
Centre on Law & Social Transformation (University of Bergen, Norway), and an Associated Senior Researcher at the
Chr. Michelsen Institute (Norway). She is an Affiliate at the Center for Human Rights & Global Justice (
CHRGJ) at New York University’s School of Law. Jackie is an editor of the
SAJHR.