New Staff Member to Join Faculty in 2009

Melbourne Law School is delighted to announce that Kirsty Gover will be joining the Faculty as a senior lecturer in 2009.

Dr Kirsty Gover recently graduated from the New York University (NYU) JSD Program, where she was an Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) Graduate Scholar and New Zealand Top Achiever Doctoral Fellow. Her dissertation is entitled “Constitutionalizing Tribalism: States, Tribes and Membership Governance in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.” Dr Gover has an LLM from Columbia University School of Law in the United States, and a BA/LLB(Hons) from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. A Columbia University School of Law Human Rights Fellow and James Kent Scholar, she was also the first full-time Institute Fellow at NYU Law School's IILJ. She has worked a senior advisor and consultant to Te Puni Kokiri (Ministry of Maori Development) and the Ministry of Justice, Wellington, New Zealand, consulting on international and domestic policy on indigenous peoples. She also taught in this field at the University of Canterbury Law School. She will teach Property Law and courses in indigenous rights at Melbourne. A forthcoming article by Dr Gover, "Genealogy as Continuity: Explaining the Growing Tribal Preference for Descent Rules in Membership Governance”, will be published in the Dec-Jan issue of American Indian Law Review. The dissertation is based on a large-scale study of the membership rules contained in the constitutions of 600 recognized tribes.