Katharine Jackson is a DeOlazarra Fellow at the Program in Political Philosophy, Policy & Law at the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. (with distinction) in political theory at Columbia University in 2019 and, prior to her academic career, practiced commercial and corporate litigation for seven years.
Kate’s dissertation, Corporate Autonomy: Law, Constitutional Democracy and Big Business, is an interdisciplinary analytical examination of the rights and internal governance of business corporations in constitutional liberal democracies. Exploring the intersection of law, politics and economics, her research focuses on how our normative commitments - both legal and political - both intervene in, and are driven by, the economy. It also adds to the new, but growing, multidisciplinary scholarship on contemporary problems within political economy that likewise claim legal provenance – from industry concentration to high finance – and implicate not only distributive justice, but also human freedom and democratic sovereignty.