Biography

Karen Pearlston has taught at the Faculty of Law, University of
New Brunswick since 2001.She teaches Family Law, Tort Law, Legal History &
Gender, Sexuality and the Law. She has published articles on 18th and
19th-century legal history and on sex work and the law, and is a co-editor of
the updated edition of a national family law casebook (Mary Jane Mossman,
Natasha Bakht, Vanessa Gruben, Karen Pearlston, eds, Families and the Law:
Cases and Commentary, 2nd ed., Captus Press, 2015). She is currently
pursuing the legal history of divorce in 20th-century Canada with a focus on
the treatment of lesbians and gay men under the Divorce Act, 1968 and (with
Jula Hughes) a project on the applicability of a reproductive justice
framework in the New Brunswick context. Karen has a long history of social
justice activism which informs her teaching and research. She works in the
queer community and is an active member of Reproductive Justice New
Brunswick.