Professor Petra Butler

Professor Butler’s academic expertise is in two distinctive research areas: human rights and international commercial contracts. In both she combines the domestic with the international and crosses boundaries among traditional legal subjects. Her approach is responsive to needs and issues arising in today’s globalised, interlinked, and interdisciplinary world. Creating synergies between subject areas, disciplines and people has been one of her key and unique research strengths. Establishing the Institute of Small and Micro States (ISMS) as an independent think tank and delivering law reform guidance, inter alia for the Commonwealth Secretariat, evidences her research approach. 

Professor Catherine Iorns

Prof Catherine Iorns has more than 30 years of experience on indigenous rights, environmental law, international law and statutory interpretation.  Her current focus is on environmental law and conservation, and she has received several awards for her environmental law teaching and research.  Most relevant to this webinar is that she led a research project on Greening the NZ Bill of Rights Act with funding from the Environmental Law Initiative to investigate whether and how BORA rights might be used to address environmental pollution that harms human health. 
In addition to her university work, Catherine is a practising barrister and on the governing Council of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
 
Prof. Dr. Martin Kment

Prof. Dr. Martin Kment is Managing Director of the Institute for Environmental Law at the University of Augsburg and also holds the Chair of Public Law and European Law, Environmental Law and Planning Law. He is founder of the German Environmental and Infrastructure Law Conference and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Academy for Spatial Development in the Leibniz Association. His research focusses on environmental, infrastructure and energy law as well as constitutional law. Martin is currently a Visitor in Residence at the Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law, where he is researching rights of nature. With reference to New Zealand law, he has published articles on the principle of sustainability and the rights of nature debate.
 
Erin Matariki Carr

Erin Matariki Carr is a woman of Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Awa and Pākehā descent. Matariki is a legal scholar and community educator working within a movement to transform the New Zealand constitution from one that is anthropocentric and hierarchical, placing humans above all other life, to one that is kin-centric and reciprocal with the land and her living systems. Matariki is co-lead of RIVER, a facilitator for Tūmanako Consultants and works as a Research Fellow for the Aotearoa Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law at the University of Auckland Law School.