Professor Janet McLean, a specialist in constitutional and administrative law, is returning to Auckland University from Britain.
She has been appointed Professor of Law and will take up the position later in 2011.
Professor McLean taught at Auckland from 1991 to 1997 and again from 1999 to 2006 before becoming Professor of Law and Governance at the University of Dundee. At Auckland she rose from lecturer to associate professor and served for two years as Deputy Dean.
She is, she says, “delighted to be coming home to the dynamic New Zealand legal scene, and to wonderful colleagues and students at the University of Auckland”.
Professor McLean teaches constitutional law, administrative law, legal method, comparative human rights law and common law theory. Public law topics on which she has published include human rights, the organisation of health services, the nature of the executive, privatisation, judicial review, and the effect of international law in domestic courts.
Her current research straddles British and New Zealand public law issues. She is working on a book project entitled Searching for the State in British Legal Thought. She and Dame Alison Quentin-Baxter are working on another book about the personal roles of the Queen and the Governor-General in New Zealand’s constitutional monarchy. This project is funded by the NZ Law Foundation.
Professor McLean holds an LLB(Hons) from Victoria University and an LLM from the University of Michigan. She taught for two years at Victoria University where she was Director of the New Zealand Institute of Public Law.
She has often acted as an adviser to the New Zealand government, serving on the Legislation Advisory Committee and on a ministerial inquiry into Human Rights Protection in New Zealand (2000). She has also contributed to the work of the World Health Organisation in the Western Pacific.
Her husband, Professor Tim Mulgan, who is at St Andrews University, has accepted an appointment at Auckland as Professor of Philosophy, starting in 2012.
This article was first published in LawTalk 768, 25 March 2011, page 12.