Katharine Young is currently serving as the听听at Columbia Law School in Spring 2025, where she is teaching听听and a seminar on听. She is a Professor and Dean鈥檚 Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School, and previously served as Associate Dean of Faculty and Global Programs. Her research focuses on international human rights law, human rights and interdisciplinarity, comparative constitutional 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. One recent application has been her work as Chair of the Working Group on Climate Change and Migration at the听Program on Global Ethics and Social Trust at Boston College, where she works closely with legal scholars in jurisdictions outside the United States, as well as scientists, ethicists and psychologists. Another has been her efforts to steer comparative research into the reshapings of human rights that have occured jurisprudentially and politically in the last decade.
Professor Young鈥檚 publications include 鈥溾�� (Georgetown Law Journal),听, (with Gr谩inne de B煤rca,听International Journal of Constitutional Law, I-CON), 鈥溾�� (Columbia Journal of Transnational Law听) selected for the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, and 鈥溾�� (Yale Journal of International Law). Her monograph,听听(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,听Harvard Human Rights Journal,听Harvard Law Review Forum,听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, Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese. 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.
Prior to joining Boston College, Professor 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.
Professor 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 Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat in Bonn, Germany, with the Legal Resources Centre in Accra, Ghana, and with Paul, Weiss in New York.
