jacinta Ruru

Biography

 Jacinta teaches first year law and upper level courses in Māori Land Law and Law and Indigenous Peoples, and is director of her innovative Te Ihaka: Building Māori Leaders in Law Programme (launched 2015). Joining Associate Professor Tracey McIntosh, Jacinta is the new co-director of Nga Pae o te Maramatanga New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence with a national and international reputation for expertise and innovation in transformative Māori focused multidisciplinary research. Jacinta’s more than 90 publications focus on exploring Indigenous peoples' legal rights to own, manage and govern land and water including national parks and minerals in Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, United States, Australia and the Scandinavia countries. She has led, or co-led, several national and international research projects including on the Common Law Doctrine of Discovery, Indigenous peoples’ rights to freshwater and multidisciplinary understandings of landscapes. She writes for several legal publishers including Adams’ Land Transfer, and The New Zealand Legal System: Structures and Processes, and edits the Brookers Maori Legislation Handbook. One of her major new collaborative works is co-editing with Justice Joe Williams a Māori law treatise entited Te Akinga: The Maori Dimension of New Zealand Law (to be published by Thomson Reuters and partly funded by a generous New Zealand Law Foundation grant).

Research Interest

 Indigenous Peoples comparative law (including rights to own, govern and manage water, land, marine area, minerals and national parks); Māori land law including Te Ture Whenua Maori Act 1993; Treaty of Waitangi; Family law and Māori; Environmental Law and Māori, Law and landscapes; Aotearoa New Zealand’s legal history, Law and Society and Law and Geography.