Karen Pearlston
LL.B. (Osgoode), LL.M. (British Columbia), Ph.D. (Osgoode) joined the Faculty of Law in 2001. Her research and teaching interests encompass English and Canadian legal history, history of women, gender, and the family, family law, tort law, feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, disability studies, and the uncertain nature of the rule of law. Dr. Pearlston worked in a shelter for homeless and abused women and their children prior to attending law school and has a long history of social justice activism which informs her teaching and research.
Recent publications include "Married Women Bankrupts in the Age of Coverture" (2009) 34 Law and Social Inquiry, 265-299 and “What a Feme Sole Trader Could Not Do: Lord Mansfield on the Limits of a Married Woman’s Commercial Freedom,” in Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010). During the 2009/2010 academic year she was a Distinguished Visitor at the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and a Harrison McCain Foundation Visiting Scholar at Kent Law School, Canterbury, UK. She is currently pursuing a comparative study of private separation in England and Ontario in the nineteenth century, some preliminary conclusions of which will appear in a forthcoming collection published by UBC Press. Other works in progress include a critical assessment of the application of adultery law to lesbians and gay men and a feminist account of the legal history of the interspousal tort immunity.
