Jade Kosché

Socio-Legal Studies (2022 cohort)

My DPhil research conjoins two of my long-held interests—labour law and women’s rights. My project aims to explore how a private labour governance program may influence cultural perceptions of gender-based violence. The 'private' regulatory method, called Worker-Driven Social Responsibility, has been used previously to essentially eliminate slave-like conditions of migrant agricultural workers in Floridian tomato farms (the Fair Food Program) and significantly reduced fatally unsafe building conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories (the Bangladesh Accord).

In 2019, the Fair Food Program and Bangladesh Accord's campaigners coordinated with unions and women's rights groups in Lesotho to implement the Gender Justice Program. Lesotho has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence globally, present in all spheres of women's lives. The programme aims to eliminate gender-based violence in garment factories where approximately 60% of workers are women and almost all have reported severe instances of gender-based violence by superiors and male co-workers.

While the Gender Justice Program is a unique opportunity to examine the effects of a non-legal governance regime in reducing gender-based violence in workplaces, it is especially interesting because of its potential to affect people's perceptions of gender-based violence in their lives more generally. Since gender-based violence is often intertwined with culturally informed gender roles, this is an intriguing possibility that could lead to the use of private labour governance for social change.

Before joining the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, I worked as a Californian employment law attorney and labour rights advocate. I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue my LL.M in international business law from Tel Aviv University in 2020. I subsequently wrote my LL.M thesis in international labour law with Tel Aviv University’s Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, entitled How Law Supports Worker-Driven Social Responsibility as Private Labor Governance: An Examination of the Role of Contract and Courts in the Fair Food Program and Bangladesh Accord.

Before pursuing graduate studies, I completed an A.A. in English Language and Literature at Los Angeles Valley College and a J.D. at Trinity Law School with an emphasis in international human rights law.

I am a research fellow at the TraffLab Project with Professor Hila Shamir, researching labour trafficking, as well as a researcher for Doctor Yofi Tirosh, conducting comparative law research on race and sex segregation. I have also served on the editorial board of the law journal Theoretical Inquiries in Law.