Kirsty Gover

Professor Kirsty Gover, a first-generation New Zealander who grew up on Kāti Māmoe-Ngāi Tahu land, is a Professor and ARC Future Fellow at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. She holds a B.A./LL.B. (Hons.) from the University of Canterbury, an LL.M. from Columbia University, and a J.S.D. from New York University, where she received the Institute for International Law and Justice Graduate Scholarship and the New Zealand Top Achiever Doctoral Fellowship. Gover joined the Melbourne Law School faculty as a Senior Lecturer in 2009 and has advanced to Professor. She serves as Programme Director of the Indigenous Peoples in International and Comparative Law Research Program and leads the Comparative Tribal Constitutionalism Research Program.

Gover teaches and writes about domestic and international law affecting Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Her research addresses the law, policy, and political theory of Indigenous rights and jurisdiction, with a focus on the transformative promise of Indigenous legal traditions and their role in reforming settler-state political theory and law. She is affiliated with the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies and the Institute for International Law and the Humanities. Gover is a member of the Law and Society Association and the Australia and New Zealand Society of International Law. Key publications include her monograph Tribal Constitutionalism: States, Tribes and the Governance of Membership (Oxford University Press, 2011). She is currently working on the book When Tribalism Meets Liberalism: Political Theory and International Law (Oxford University Press). The ARC Future Fellowship highlights her leadership and impact in Indigenous legal scholarship.

Professional Email: kgover@unimelb.edu.au