SPEAKERS
Professor Kim Rubenstein
Director
Centre for International & Public Law (CIPL)
Australian National University
Kim Rubenstein is Professor and Director of the Centre for International and Public Law (CIPL) in the ANU College of Law, Australian National University. Kim’s current research projects are at the cutting edge of the intersection between public and international law.
Her public law work spans constitutional and administrative law, and also includes her expertise in citizenship law. Over the past 11 years she has analysed the legal status of citizen, and considered the differences between that formal notion and the broader normative understanding of citizenship as membership of a community.
Her book, Australian Citizenship Law in Context (Lawbook, 2002) represents much of that core work, looking at the disjuncture between the exclusive legal notion and the more inclusive normative understanding of citizenship. In 2002-2003 she was based at Georgetown University Law Center, having won the prestigious Fulbright Senior Scholar award to study the status of nationality in an international law context. Recently Kim initiated an international research network on feminism and constitutional law and, in 2004, ran a workshop looking at issues of feminism and federalism with participants from the US, Canada and Australia. Her international law research continues with the work she was developing at Georgetown and she has been invited to various international workshops and conferences to present her work.
Kim is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and Harvard Law School. Her graduate work at Harvard was supported by the Sir Robert Menzies Scholarship to Harvard, a Fulbright postgraduate award, and a Queen Elizabeth Jubilee Trust award. She spent 12 years at the University of Melbourne developing her academic career. Kim’s interests also encompass teaching (where she has co-authored a book on Feedback) and the broader field of education, particularly women’s education. She is currently completing a biography of Joan Montgomery OBE, former Principal of Presbyterian Ladies College Melbourne, and an influential educator.
In addition to her scholarly work, Kim has made a significant contribution to the greater community. She has done so through media work and public community education. In the practical legal sphere, Kim has made significant contributions to the jurisprudence in citizenship. She has now appeared three times in the High Court of Australia on citizenship matters and her work was cited in the judgment of Singh v Commonwealth (2004).
