People

Find out about the researchers, teaching staff, and other people associated with the New Zealand Centre for Public Law.

Director

Joel Colon-rios

joel.colon-rios@vuw.ac.nz

Associate Director

Dr Marnie Lloydd

Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Law

marnie.lloydd@vuw.ac.nz
GB , Government Buildings, 55 Lambton Quay

Senior Research Fellows

Jhonny Antonio Pabón Cadavid

Jhonny Antonio Pabón Cadavid holds a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, a Magister Science (MSc) in Knowledge Management from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and a Master of Arts in History from Universidad Javeriana, Colombia. He is a member of the Colombian Academy of History. He has worked as a Copyright Advisor for the National Library of New Zealand and as a researcher in Colombia and New Zealand.

Fiona McDonald

BA, LLB, Victoria University of Wellington; LLM, JSD, Dalhousie University

Fiona McDonald is Co-Director of the Australian Centre for Health Law Research and is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Bioethics, Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University.

Her research focuses on legal and ethical issues in relation to the governance of health systems. It has four broad themes: the governance of health systems (including public and environmental health); the governance of health organisations; the governance of health professionals and the health workforce; and the governance of health technologies.

Email: fiona.mcdonald@qut.edu.au
QUT website

Dr Ruby Moynihan

LLB, BA, MInSt University of Otago; PhD in Law, University of Edinburgh

Ruby Moynihan is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the School of Law, University College Cork, Ireland and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Ruby’s research and teaching examines how international and comparative national law evolves to address complex environmental challenges in a changing geopolitical world. She specialises in the areas of climate change, biodiversity, freshwater and the marine environment where she explores questions of natural resources equity, justice and the interface between law, science, and policy.

Ruby has been the recipient of several prestigious research scholarships including from the Irish Research Council and the Scottish Government’s Hydro Nation fund. Ruby regularly contributes to high-level collaborative projects for UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO), UN Economic Commission for Europe, World Wide Fund for Nature, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), and Adelphi International.

Ruby is an invited member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law, Specialist Group on Water and Wetlands and the European Environmental Law Forum.

Previously, Ruby worked as a research associate at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Department of Environmental and Planning Law, Germany, and at the UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science, University of Dundee, Scotland. Prior to that she worked as a barrister and solicitor in one of New Zealand’s premier law firms.

Email: ruby.moynihan@vuw.ac.nz
UCC website

Steven Price

LLB(Hons), BA, Master of Journalism, UC Berkeley

Researcher for the Independent Reporting Mechanism of the Open Government Partnership

Email: steven.price@vuw.ac.nz

Miriam Seifter

Miriam Seifter is an Associate Professor of Law and Rowe Faculty Fellow in Regulatory Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Her research and teaching interests include administrative law, federalism, state and local government law, constitutional law, and property law. Her recent work focuses on executive power and the separation of powers at the state and federal levels, and on the role of civil society in public law. Her publications appear or are forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others. In 2017, UW Law students honored Professor Seifter with the Classroom Teacher of the Year Award, and in 2018, she received one of twelve Distinguished Teaching Awards from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For her article Gubernatorial Administration, Seifter was named the 2017 winner of the American Constitution Society's Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition on Regulatory and Administrative Law.

Professor Seifter received a B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University, an M.Sc. with distinction from Oxford University, and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was the Environmental Fellow and an Articles Editor on the Harvard Law Review. After law school, she served as a law clerk for Chief Judge Merrick Garland on the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court of the United States. Prior to joining the UW Law faculty, she was a Visiting Researcher and Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and worked in private practice at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in San Francisco.

Email: miriam.seifter@wisc.edu
UW website

Guy Sinclair

BA/LLB(Hons) (Auck), LLM(Hons) (Auck), JSD (NYU)

Associate Professor at the University of Auckland.

Email: guy.sinclair@auckland.ac.nz
Auckland Website

Robert Yablon

Robert Yablon is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. His research interests include political and election law, constitutional law, federal courts, and statutory interpretation, and his articles have appeared in the Northwestern University Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Iowa Law Review, among others. In 2018, UW Law students honored Professor Yablon with the Classroom Teacher of the Year Award, and in 2019 he received a University Distinguished Teaching Award.

Professor Yablon received his bachelor's degree in economics and political science from the University of Wisconsin and his master's degree in social policy from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He then earned his J.D. at Yale Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following law school, Professor Yablon served as a law clerk for Judge William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. He also worked in private practice at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. He has been the principal author of dozens of appellate and trial-level briefs, and has argued in a number of state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

Email: robert.yablon@wisc.edu
UW website

Jason Varuhas

BA LLB (Hons) VUW, LLM UCL, PhD Cambridge

Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne

Jason N E Varuhas is Professor of Law at Melbourne Law School and Senior Crown Counsel at the New Zealand Crown Law Office. He is founder and Director of the international series of Public Law Conferences and Senior Research Fellow at the New Zealand Centre for Public Law at Victoria University of Wellington. Professor Varuhas was previously Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School. He has held academic positions at the University of Cambridge, University of New South Wales, and Victoria University of Wellington, and visiting positions at Oxford, Yale and McGill Universities. He is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.

Professor Varuhas has published widely in the fields of constitutional, administrative, human rights and private law, and is author of leading treatises on administrative law, the law of torts, and the law of damages. His scholarship has been cited regularly by courts across the common law world, including by the New Zealand Supreme Court, High Court of Australia and UK Supreme Court. He has made significant contributions to law reform, including most recently the reform of the English judicial review procedure, and to the public understanding of law, most recently leading Melbourne Law School’s series of public engagement events on The Voice referendum, “Conversations About the Voice”. His doctoral thesis was awarded the Yorke Prize at the University of Cambridge, and the ensuing book, Damages and Human Rights, was awarded both the UK Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship and the Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize. In December 2023 he delivered the Robin Cooke Lecture at Victoria University of Wellington, on the topic of “The Future of Public Law in Aotearoa New Zealand”.