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Mrs Kate Ritchie

Profile summary

  • Central Academic Staff
  • Lecturer in Law
  • The Faculty of Business & Law
  • The Open University Law School
  • The Law School
  • kate.ritchie

Professional biography

Kate joined the Open University as a lecturer in law in September 2021, having previously worked as an Associate Lecturer for several years. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Kate completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Southampton and her LLM at the Open University.

Before joining the Open University, she lectured on the Legal Practice Course at, what was then, the College of Law (now the University of Law) in Bloomsbury London and prior to that she practised as a solicitor in the areas of corporate and commercial law.

Research interests

Kate’s research interests primarily revolve around the concept of belonging, particularly in relation to vulnerable groups such as migrants and prisoners. 

She is a project lead on the Law School’s Peer Mentoring Programme, part of the Law School’s Belonging Project. She co-presented a paper at the Association of Law Teachers’ Conference in April 2024 on the findings of a recent study on the impact of using WhatsApp as a communication tool in peer mentoring.

She is currently exploring the scope for game-based learning to foster communities of practice and a sense of belonging between students in a distance learning context, as well as its value in embedding knowledge and skills.

She is also working on a project aimed at understanding the enablers of, and barriers to, effective study by students in secure environments.

Teaching interests

Kate has a wide range of teaching experience, having taught law at both the College of Law and, since then, on a variety of modules as an Associate Lecturer with the OU. Her areas of interest include contract law and business law.

She was part of the LLB production team that won an OU Teaching Excellence award. As part of this team, she authored on a number of modules, including W212, W260 and W323, as well as producing several skills sections for W360’s Launchpad and contributing to materials for the access module, Y035.

She chaired the production of the SQE module, W323 (Business Law and Dispute Resolution), and now chairs this in presentation.

She is also on the module teams for the following modules:

  • W322 (Property and Private Client Law) (SQE)
  • W360 (Justice in Action)

 

She is project lead for the Business and Employment Law Clinic, part of the OU’s Open Justice Centre. She was part of the Open Justice Centre Team that won an OU Teaching Excellence award in 2024.

 

External collaborations

Kate is a member of various networks and associations, including LEGEND (Legal Educational Games: Evaluation, Network, Dissemination) the Student Belonging Community of Practice, the Socio Legal Studies Association and the Association of Law Teachers.

Publications

The Rwanda Case: Testing the Limits of Judicial Competence (2024)
Ritchie, Kate
Judicial Review, 29(2) (pp. 91-106)