Scholarships empower law alumni

The academic aspirations of Māori lawyer Amelia Kendall were bolstered this week thanks to an $80,000 injection from the Borrin Foundation.

The University of Auckland law graduate, who has worked in commercial law and completed a total immersion te reo Māori course last year, will pursue a Master of Laws in the US, thanks to the scholarship.

A descendant of Te Rarawa from the small town of Mitimiti in the Hokianga, Amelia intends to focus on constitutional, Indigenous and international law.

Meanwhile, another Auckland law graduate, Alexander Young, will also pursue a Master of Laws in the US thanks to a $60,000 scholarship.

Alexander plans to study Indigenous cultural approaches to land use, particularly in relation to wetlands. He’ll also assess how Indigenous cultural knowledge might be applied to climate change adaptation frameworks.

Faculty of Law women’s mentor and 2016 graduate Erica Burke has also scored support from the Borrin Foundation, receiving a $10,000 Travel and Learning Award.

Erica, a family law expert and co-editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Women’s Law Journal, plans to use the award to visit organisations that provide targeted legal support and advocacy for women in Australia, Scotland, San Francisco and Oslo.

Her vision is to develop the framework for a free and inclusive legal clinic and advocacy centre in Tāmaki Makaurau for those who identify as wāhine.

Two other Borrin Foundation scholarship recipients, Pita Roycroft and Allan Beever, also have ties to the University of Auckland.

Allan Beever briefly taught at the University and undertook his undergraduate and postgraduate studies there, completing his PhD in 1994.

Now a leading tort lawyer and theorist of private law, Allan is the recipient of a $9,100 scholarship, which he’ll use to travel to present the findings of his forthcoming book ‘Freedom under the Private Law’, and to receive feedback on this work at three events in the UK.

Pita Roycroft (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) has tutored public law and legal skills courses for over five years at both the University of Auckland and Victoria University, from where he graduated in 2018.

Pita was awarded $80,000 to pursue a Master of Laws in the US, and he hopes to investigate whether and to what extent principles of indigenous or customary law (such as tikanga Māori) can influence the development of tort law in Aotearoa and other Western states with Indigenous populations.