Biography
Renée Ramona Robinson is an international and critical legal scholar whose work examines creative economies, transnational legal ordering, and the global political economy of property, labor, and value. She holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, an LL.M in Droit Economique from Sciences Po, an LL.M. in International Law from Queen Mary, and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. She will receive her PhD from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she completed a cotutelle with Institut Français de la Mode, researching the paradoxical schism of public and private international law in the global value chain of the fashion industry. Her professional experience includes work on international arbitration and sovereign-state representation at LALIVE, Dechert, and Foley Hoag, as well as consulting experience with UNESCO. She has designed and launched four original courses across Sciences Po's undergraduate Law College, the Institut Français de la Mode, and ESCP, including courses in Fashion Law, Art Law, Public International Law, and Feminist Legal Theory and Sex Equality. Alongside her academic and professional work, she is dedicated to creating communities. Recognized as the sole founder at Harvard Law School, she independently founded the Harvard Fashion Law Association, created the Harvard Art Law Review, and served as President of these organizations and more, in the spaces of international law. In parallel, she regularly delivers lectures and speaks at conferences on these experiences, contributing to scholarly and professional discussions while advancing the visibility of law’s role in shaping cultural and creative sectors.
Taking a socio-legal and feminist legal theory approach to law and the creative industries, she studies fashion, art, and cultural heritage as sites where transnational legal architectures actively constitute the legal invisibility of the communities and producers who sustain global value chains. This research agenda is part of her broader theoretical and practice-oriented mission: it is concerned with how law structures global value chains and cultural markets, but also with how lawyers can represent and consult governments, art institutions, museums, and brands; advise on evolving labor, sustainability, and environmental regulations; and negotiate restitution, repatriation, and cultural property disputes across jurisdictions.
As a Max Weber Fellow, Renée will work primarily on her book, Fashioning Law and Value: Property, Gender, and the Global Political Economy of Fashion, forthcoming with Bristol University Press in 2027, which builds on her doctoral research to argue that international law does not merely regulate the global fashion system but actively constitutes it producing "unimagined communities". During the fellowship year, she will also develop a second book proposal theorizing art, fashion, and cultural heritage as three parallel global systems of value. Bringing international law into conversation with critical property theory, Black feminist legal thought, sociology of value, and Afrofuturist legal imaginaries, the project reveals law’s role as a social infrastructure in creative economies that fragments responsibility and stabilizes accumulation not only through material dispossession, but also by shaping the conditions under which communities can imagine, desire, and create value on their own terms.