Date: August 25, 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 12pm – 1pm
Venue: Room 901, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Renée Ramona Robinson (Max Weber Fellow, European University Institute)
This seminar takes the global fashion economy as its central site of analysis and develops the concept of “unimagined communities” to describe collectivities of feminized and racialized workers whose labor is indispensable to global fashion value chains, even as they remain structurally illegible within law’s categories of ownership, market power, subjecthood, and responsibility.
The seminar develops a methodology for analyzing the juridical architecture of value: a way of reading how legal doctrine constructs what counts as value, who is recognized as its author, and whose labor remains outside the categories that confer legal claim. It applies this methodology across two doctrinal fields. First, through property, contract, and corporate form, it shows how value is made mobile, ownable, and protectable while the labor producing it is fragmented and disowned. Second, turning to antitrust law, it traces the same architecture through labor monopsony: buyers exercise control over production without ownership, while doctrine often treats that control as a benign feature of market structure rather than a site of competitive harm.
The seminar argues that these forms of disappearance are not simply doctrinal gaps or regulatory failures. They are recurring features of a broader legal architecture through which property, value, and responsibility are distributed across the global fashion economy. The talk draws on a forthcoming monograph and article in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law.
Renée Ramona Robinson is an international and feminist critical legal scholar whose work examines creative economies, transnational legal ordering, and the global political economy of property, labor, and value. She holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University, Sciences Po, Queen Mary University of London, and Harvard Law School, and will receive her PhD from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, completed in cotutelle with the Institut Français de la Mode. Her professional training includes work on public international law and investment arbitration matters involving sovereign states, alongside a broader practice-oriented research agenda concerned with advising governments, art institutions, and brands, with restitution, repatriation, and cultural property disputes. She teaches regularly at Sciences Po and IFM, designing courses in fashion law, art law, public international law, and feminist legal theory. Following her visit at HKU Law, she will join the EUI as a Max Weber Fellow in Law, where she will complete her first monograph, Fashioning Law and Value: Property, Gender, and the Global Political Economy of Fashion (Bristol University Press, 2027), and begin a second book project theorizing art, fashion, and cultural heritage as parallel global systems of value.
Chair: Shane Chalmers, Assistant Professor & Deputy Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=108299.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.