Jackie Dugard

Jackie Dugard is a Senior Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) and the Department Political Science, Columbia University. She is also a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa (where she taught property law, and human rights law between 2014 and 2022). At Columbia, Jackie teaches International Human Rights Law, Socio-Economic Rights, and Climate Justice as part of the Human Rights Studies MA program.

With a background in law and social sciences - BA (Hons) & LLB (Wits); MPhil & PhD (Cambridge); LLM (Essex) - Jackie focuses on the role of law in social change (internationally, and in South Africa). She has published widely on socio-economic rights (especially the rights to housing, land, and water), and legal mobilization. Jackie is the lead co-author of Edward Elgar's Research Handbook on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as Human Rights (Jackie Dugard, Bruce Porter, Daniela Ikawa, and Lilian Chenwi, 2020). Her most recent publication is: Jackie 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.

Jackie is the workstream leader on Land and Housing Rights for a UN Prevention project that aims to identify and consolidate upstream ways to prevent land and housing rights violations globally. She is also part of a 6-year Research Council of Norway-funded project, 'Pluriland', which is examining the impact on human security of enacting plural land rights across six countries. Arising from Pluriland, Jackie and Rachel Sieder from CIESAS (Mexico City) are co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of Law in Context on the enactment of plural land rights in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, India, Mexico, and South Africa.

Jackie was the co-founder and first executive director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI), and the founding 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 Associate Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (Norway). Jackie is an editor of the South African Journal on Human Rights (SAJHR).