Katharine Young is Professor and Dean鈥檚 Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School. She previously served as Associate Dean of Faculty and Global Programs. Her research focuses on comparative constitutional law, international human rights law, economic and social rights, and law and gender. Her recent scholarship examines how 鈥減ositive鈥� legal obligations, which require state action rather than restraint, challenge traditional constitutionalist models of public law. This includes an extended study of the mechanisms of queues and waiting lists in law, and a comparative analysis of social movements and litigation around rights to health care, housing, education, and other economic and social rights.听
Professor Young鈥檚 publications include: 鈥溾�� (Georgetown Law Journal), 鈥溾�� (Columbia Journal of Transnational Law听) selected for the 2016 Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, and 鈥溾�� (Yale Journal of International Law). Her monograph,听 (Oxford University Press, 2012), is published in the Oxford Constitutional Theory series. She has also edited听听(Cambridge University Press, 2019) with a foreword by Amartya Sen, and听听with Kim Rubenstein (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Other recent publications have appeared in the听University of听Toronto Law Journal, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Harvard Law Review Forum, International Journal of Constitutional Law (I-CON),听Australian Year Book of International Law,听and more than a dozen edited books.听Young has also co-published a casebook with Jim Rogers,听听(Foundation Press, 2017) and her work has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. She is currently co-editing, with Malcolm Langford, the听,听an interdisciplinary study that involves legal, philosophical, historical, and broader social scientific inquiry in relation to such rights, across states and regions in both the Global North and Global South.
Before coming to Boston College, Young was an Associate Professor at the Australian National University and a Byse Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School. She completed fellowships with Harvard University鈥檚 Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Young earned her B.A. and LL.B. (Hons) from the University of Melbourne and later completed the LL.M. studies and S.J.D. degree from Harvard University as a Knox Scholar. She also completed a law exchange at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (in German). She clerked for Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG of the Australian High Court, and represented the winning team, for Australia, of the Jessup International Law Moot Court. When in practice, she worked as a lawyer with Allens in Melbourne, with the United Nations in Bonn, Germany, with the Legal Resources Centre in Accra, Ghana, and with Paul, Weiss in New York.
