Lecture Synopsis:
In this lecture, Judy Fudge examines the legal norm of equality that is enshrined in various human rights and anti-discrimination instruments. She questions whether the legal norm of equality has the capacity to improve women’s living standards and enhance women’s freedom by showing how it currently fails to challenge deeply embedded and gendered norms in labour law about what counts as socially valuable work and who should do various types of work.

Speaker Biography:
Judy Fudge is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria, Canada. She adopts feminist, political economy, and historical approaches to the study of employment and labour law. She has held visiting positions at the European University Institute, Lund University, REMESO at Linköping University, McGill University's Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, the University of Melbourne, the University of Oxford, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Saskatchewan. In 2009, she received the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights for her research project “Labour Rights as Human Rights: Unions, Women, and Migrants”.