News Item

Professor Campbell McLachlan QC has received New Zealand’s premier legal research award, the 2010 NZ Law Foundation International Research Fellowship.

The award was made at the Law Foundation’s Annual Awards Dinner on 24 November. Worth up to $125,000 annually, it enables recipients to study a defined aspect of the law in New Zealand or overseas, for the benefit of New Zealand and its legal system.

Internationally respected for his work in public and private international law, Professor McLachlan’s research topic is Foreign Relations Law.

The project is a study of the impact of public international law on the Anglo-Commonwealth Legal system.

It will lead to a book to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2011/12.

“It would be difficult to underestimate the intellectual and practical significance of the central concerns of foreign relations law,” Professor McLachlan says.

“It provides the key to the reception of public international law within the domestic legal system, and thus to its day-to-day application across a myriad of contexts in public administration and the courts. It serves to explain the limits of the domestic legal system, constrained as it is by the international law of jurisdiction.

“It also illuminates the legal parameters within which the executive must exercise its foreign relations power. These rules underpin the relationship between our legal system and international law at a time of unprecedented impact of internationally-framed rules on domestic decision-making, legislation and adjudication.”

As well as being a professor at Victoria University’s Law Faculty, Campbell McLachlan is an associate member of Bankside Chambers in Auckland and a member of Essex Court in London.

He decided to return to academia from practising as a partner of London-based Herbert Smith. In fact, he was head of its International Law Practice Group until his return to New Zealand in 2003.

During his time with that firm, he represented both sovereign states and multi-national corporations.

Professor McLachlan is well known internationally in his specialist field of international commercial litigation and arbitration.

Educated at Victoria University and the University of London, where he gained his Ph D in 1988, Professor McLachlan holds the Diploma cum laude of The Hague Academy of International Law.

The president of the Australian & New Zealand Society of International Law, he took the silk in 2007.

The New Zealand Law Foundation International Resarch Fellowship is New Zealand’s premier legal research award worth up to $125,000 annually. Details about the award and previous winners can be found on the Law Foundation’s website www.lawfoundation.org.nz/scholarships/.