Associate Professor Māmari Stephens

Māmari completed an MA (Distinction) in Classical Studies, BA (Hons), and an LLB (Hons) at Victoria University. She then spent three and a half years at Russell McVeagh in Wellington working in the Māori legal team in the Corporate Advisory Group, latterly concentrating on ACC law.

Māmari has been with the Faculty of Law at Victoria University of Wellington since January 2006 and, with Assistant Professor Mary Boyce of the University of Hawai'i, runs the Legal Māori Project. The outputs of this project are available free online at www.legalmaori.net. 

Her primary research interests are law and language, Māori and the New Zealand legal system, and social security law.  She is currently working on a social security law textbook to be published by Thomson Reuters. This book is also being supported by a grant from the Law Foundation. 

Research Interests

  • The use of Māori language in legal contexts
  • Māori and the New Zealand legal system
  • NZ legal history and jurisprudence
  • Social Security law (including ACC law)
  • Criminal Law
  • Treaty of Waitangi
Te Rarawa
Associate Professor
Victoria University of Wellington

Related Projects

Kia Ārohi Kia Mārama - Scoping Excellence

Project commenced:

He Pounga: the Māori Jurisprudence Project (Stage 1)

This research seeks to investigate Māori jurisprudence. Māori jurisprudence, broadly speaking, comprises a set of tikanga and how those tikanga are used in everyday life to make decisions that affect Māori communities. For this research we wish to focus specifically on the most important institution of Māori decision-making: the hui. This pilot project will investigate a limited set of hui, specifically examining decision-making and the role of tikanga in such decision-making, within urban contexts.  The research hypothesis upon which this project is designed is that modern everyday Maori jurisprudence is observable and distinct, despite the impact of Western legal frameworks.