Susy Frankel’s research focuses on international intellectual property law. She teaches courses on a number of topics, including:

• intellectual property (including copyright, patents, and trade marks)
• patent law and innovation
• global intellectual property issues
• international trade law
• the protection of traditional knowledge and regulation.

Susy has published widely and is frequently invited to give conference presentations on various aspects of intellectual property and its nexus with trade law and international regulatory issues.

From 2011 to 2013 Susy was the project leader of the New Zealand Law Foundation Regulatory Reform Project, funded to NZ$1.8 million. The project produced a cutting-edge regulatory toolkit.

Alberto Costi is an Associate Professor of Law at Victoria University of Wellington.

He holds degrees from the Université de Montréal, the College of Europe in Bruges, and Harvard Law School.

Alberto’s teaching and research interests relate to public international law, including the following:

• the law of international organisations
• the law of armed conflict
• international human rights law
• international environmental law
• comparative law
• EU law.

In all those areas, he has published extensively, presented papers at numerous international conferences, commented in the media, and appeared before parliamentary committees.

Many aspects of Alberto’s research include discussion of the impacts of international events on economic development, the role of international law in promoting economic growth in transition economies and developing states, and the use of soft law in financial regulation.

Alberto presented a paper on the negotiation of an economic partnership agreement between the EU and Pacific Islands at the international trade conference “Trade Agreements: Where do we go from here?” organised by the NZCIEL in 2009. He was a co-organiser of the 2011 conference “Enhancing Stability in the International Economic Order” and co-editor (with Susy Frankel) of the volume of essays produced from that conference.

He currently sits on the editorial boards of six journals and serves as Vice-President of the New Zealand Association for Comparative Law and Secretary-General of the International Law Association New Zealand Branch.

Faculty affiliates

Meredith Lewis holds an appointment at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and also at SUNY Buffalo Law School.

Meredith’s research focuses on international economic law, with a particular emphasis on international trade law and the World Trade Organization. She teaches public and private international law subjects, including International Trade Law and International Business Transactions.

She is also Director of the Canada–United States Legal Studies Centre. Meredith is Co-Executive Vice President and a founding member of the Society of International Economic Law; a member of the International Law Association’s International Trade Law Committee; and co-chair of the American Society of International Law’s “Law in the Pacific Rim Region” interest group.

Gordon Anderson is an Emeritus Professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington whose primary fields of expertise are labour law and international trade law. His expertise spans across various works published in New Zealand and overseas. These include a comprehensive and reconstructive analysis of the country's labour laws and Aotearoa’s trade perspectives and experience within the Asia–Pacific region.

Prof Anderson has a particular interest in the evolution of free trade agreements, the relationship between international trade law and international labour law standards, and worker exploitation of migrant labour and worker exploitation in supply chains.

Richard Boast specialises in natural resources law, property law, Māori legal issues and legal history. He has  authored or co-authored various works  including:

• A New Zealand Legal History (2004)
• Foreshore and Seabed (2005)
• Buying the Land, Selling the Land (2008) which was awarded the Montana Book award for history in 2009
• an edition of Native Land Court Decisions, The Native Land Court 1862–1887: A Historical Study, Cases and Commentary (2013).

Richard’s particular interests are in the areas of land and land tenure, and the interrelationships between land tenure and political economy (explored in detail in his 2009 book, Buying the Land, Selling the Land).

In the New Zealand Law Foundation Regulatory Reform Project, Richard co-authored chapters about property rights and regulatory takings in New Zealand, and about the relationship between regulatory takings with international investment law.

In 2012 Richard was awarded a Marsden grant to research comparative tenurial change around the Pacific rim in the 19th century.

He has a particular interest in Latin American parallels with New Zealand legal history. He has developed a number of links with economic and legal historians in a number of Latin American countries, including Mexico and Uruguay.

Bevan Marten’s research focuses on maritime and transport law.

His book, Port State Jurisdiction and the Regulation of International Merchant Shipping (Springer, 2013) explores the extent to which international law enables states to regulate foreign-flagged vessels visiting their ports.

Other publications highlight Bevan’s interest in the international regulatory aspects of the maritime sector, and the intersections in this field between domestic and international law and between private and public law.

Bevan is a member of the Maritime Law Association of Australia and New Zealand (MLAANZ). He takes an active role in the Association’s law reform programme.

Paul Scott’s area of interest is primarily competition law. He has undergraduate degrees in law and economics and a Master of Laws.

Paul previously worked as a litigation lawyer at the Commerce Commission and in the Crown Law Office. He has written and contributed to a number of articles, chapters, and books on competition law and regulated industries, some of them scholarly.

Victoria Stace teaches company and partnership law, insolvency law, and financial markets law.

She has authored or co-authored two books on financial markets law: Securities Law in New Zealand (2010) and Financial Market Conduct Regulation, A Practitioner’s Guide (2014). She has also published research relating to financial adviser regulation in New Zealand and directors’ duties and liabilities.

Victoria has a particular interest in financial markets law and regulation. She has worked in private practice in Wellington for around 20 years as a commercial lawyer and was a partner at Chapman Tripp.

She was an adjunct lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington for several years before becoming a lecturer in 2015.

In 2015 Victoria and Matteo Solinas co-founded the Law School’s Corporate and Financial Law Reading Group. This was an initiative to provide a forum for discussion of common interests and work-in-progress presentations from academics, solicitors, and other professionals working in the fields of corporate and financial law.

Professor Jessica Lai specialises in intellectual property, with a distinct focus on patent law, the safeguarding of Mātauranga Māori, and the interplay between patents and gender.

Jessica has undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and a doctorate from the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. She is a recognised author of numerous works, including Patent Law and Women (Routledge, 2022) and Patent Law and Policy (LexisNexis, 2016).

Jessica's research excellence and ongoing commitment have been recognised by notable awards such as the Royal Society's Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2021. From 2019 to 2022, together with Susy Frankel, she worked on a project titled ‘Mission Creep in the Pharmaceutical Industry and its Impact on Innovation and Health’, which was granted a Marsden Fund Standard Grant.

After completing her postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, Jessica joined the School of Accounting and Commercial Law in 2016. She served as Head of School from July 2021 to June 2022, subsequently committing to her Rutherford Discovery Fellowship.

Matteo Solinas is an Associate Professor in the School of Private and Commercial Law at UNSW Sydney. His current and ongoing research focuses on company law, financial regulation, and personal property

Before joining UNSW, Matteo was an Associate Professor in Commercial Law at the Law Faculty of Te Herenga Waka —Victoria University of Wellington. Prior to that, he served as lecturer (and then senior lecturer) for five years at the School of Law at the University of Glasgow.  He also worked as legal researcher at the Financial Markets Law Committee c/o Bank of England and in 2023 to 2024 as legal adviser at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

Prior to undertaking his academic career, Matteo practised corporate law in Milan for almost a decade and is a qualified (non-practising) solicitor in England and Wales.

Matteo has a keen interest in areas related to international economic law, such as corporate and financial law, with a focus on post-trading regulation and the law of intermediated securities. He has also contributed to legal scholarship on blockchain and decentralised finance. His research in these areas has led to major contributions to company law and banking law across different jurisdictions, including Europe, England, Scotland, and Italy.

Before joining the University, Matteo maintained roles in legal research and consultancy. He worked as a corporate and financial lawyer in Italy and is also qualified to practice law in England and Wales.

In 2008, he served as a legal researcher at the Financial Markets Law Committee at the Bank of England. In 2015, he also worked as a consultant for UNIDROIT and contributed to the UNIDROIT Legislative Guide on Intermediated Securities  supplementing the UNIDROIT Convention on Substantive Rules for Intermediated Securities (the Geneva Securities Convention) 2009.

Michelle Limenta is an Associate Professor at Universitas Pelita Harapan (Indonesia) and serves as Director of the UPH Centre for International Trade and Investment. She holds an LLB degree from Trisakti University (Indonesia), an LLM in International Business Law from the University of Leiden (Netherlands), and a PhD in International Trade Law from Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington.

AProf Limenta has established a scholarly record in international trade law through publications and public speaking events. She was a Fulbright US-ASEAN Visiting Scholar in 2023. Besides, she has advised and conducted research for public and private agencies on trade policy as well as ASEAN and WTO laws, marking her as a keen analytic mind in the areas of trade laws and regional economic integration.

In 2012 she successfully completed her PhD thesis, “Non-Compliance in WTO Dispute Settlement: Assessing the Effectiveness of WTO Retaliation from its Purpose(s)”. Following the completion of her PhD, Michelle was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at the New Zealand Centre for International Economic Law (NZCIEL).

Monique Egli Costi is an independent scholar currently completing a reference monograph on the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) for Kluwer Law International.

She has participated in the Visitors Programme of the Victoria University of Wellington Law School since November 2011 (intermittently) and has been a Visiting Scholar (chercheure invitée) at the Centre d’études en droit économique, Faculté de droit, Université Laval, Québec City, Canada, in March 2014.

In recent years, Ms Egli Costi has been invited to speak on a range of issues relating to international financial regulation, foreign direct investment, the global financial crisis, global governance, and the fight against money laundering. She has presented at international conferences hosted by organisations such as:

• the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS)
• the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL)
• the Canadian Council on International Law (CCIL)
• the International Economic Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law (ASIL)
• the New Zealand Centre of International Economic Law (NZCIEL).

She is a member of ACUNS, ANZSIL, CCIL, as well as of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) and the New Zealand Association for Comparative Law (NZACL).

Prior to turning to academic research, Ms Egli Costi was Head of International Affairs at the New Zealand Securities Commission and its successor Financial Markets Authority until the end of June 2011.

She holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, a degree in political science and public administration from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and a postgraduate business degree from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Monique’s work appears in the following publications:

• Institutional Evolution and Characteristics of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) (2014)
• New Zealand Association for Comparative Law Yearbook vol. 20 199–232 (2015)
• Comparative Law Journal of the Pacific/Journal de Droit Comparé du Pacifique vol. 21 199–232.