Project Info - Research Team

Reference Group | Research Team | Methodology

Richard Boast is a Professor of Law at Victoria University of Wellington and currently teaches property law, legal history and energy and resources law. Richard also practises in the area of Maori and Treaty litigation and represents several iwi groups in inquiries currently being heard by the Waitangi Tribunal. He is the author of Buying the Land, Selling the Land: Governments and Maori Land in the North Island 1865-1921 and of two volumes on the history of the Native Land Court.

Dr Shaunnagh Dorsett is Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. Her research is interdisciplinary, and she writes primarily at the intersections of legal history, native title and legal theory. She has published on equity, comparative native title, foreshore and seabed, the jurisprudence of jurisdiction and colonial legal history. Her most recent book is Juridical Encounters: Maori and the Colonial Courts 1840-1852.

Dr Mark Hickford is Dean and Professor of Law at Victoria University of Wellington. In 1999 he completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford on British imperial history in relation to early New Zealand legal and political history. He has been a Beit Senior Scholar in British Imperial and Commonwealth History and received a number of other scholarships, including an Overseas Research Studentship Award from the United Kingdom. He is the author of Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire.

Dr Geoff McLay is a Professor of Law Victoria University of Wellington. He is a former Law Commissioner and current Editor of the New Zealand Law Reports. He has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses including torts, advanced torts, intellectual property, competition (antitrust) law, comparative constitutional law, and ethics. He has widely published in all of these areas and is currently engaged in writing a biography of Chief Justice Stout.

Dr Damen Ward is Senior Crown Counsel at the Crown Law Office. He has a DPhil in British imperial history from the University of Oxford, and has published on the history of the application of English law to indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand. He was a Rhodes Scholar, and in 2002-3 was Beit Senior Scholar in Imperial and Commonwealth History at Oxford University. He is currently engaged in a project on Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation.