Co-Director, Otago Centre for Law and Society
Convenor of Students, Faculty of Law
Contact
Tel +64 3 479 8859
Email anna.high@otago.ac.nz
Teaching
Anna teaches Evidence Law, Jurisprudence, Chinese Law, and Gender and the Law.
Research
Anna is a socio-legal scholar who has adopted a “law in action” approach to three main areas of interest: feminist theory/sexual violence, evidence law, and Chinese law. She has also published in the area of legal education/pedagogy. She is co-director of the Otago Centre for Law and Society.
In 2022, Anna was awarded the Royal Society Te Apārangi Early Career Research Excellence Award for Humanities.
Anna currently holds a research grant from the Royal Society Marsden fund, focusing on sexual dignity, consent and sexual violence law in Aotearoa New Zealand law. Her research in this field has been published in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism; the New Zealand Law Review; and the New Zealand Law Journal.
Anna is one of New Zealand's foremost experts on evidence law. She is a regular Faculty member at Te Kura Kaiwhakawā Institute of Judicial Studies annual programme on evidence and procedure law, and has been appointed a member of the New Zealand Law Commission's Expert Advisory Group for the forthcoming third review of the Evidence Act 2006.
Anna High is a past recipient of the Asian Law and Society Association Distinguished Book Award (2020, “Non-Governmental Orphan Relief in China: Law, Policy, and Practice”); the New Zealand Law Foundation Sir Ian Barker Published Article Award (2020, with Caroline Hickman, “The 'Any Evidence' Rule in New Zealand Family Law”); and the New Zealand Law Society Honourable Rex Mason Writing Award (2022, with Mihiata Pirini, “Dignity and Mana in the 'Third Law' of Aotearoa New Zealand”).
Otago Centre for Law and Society
Background
Following the completion of her doctorate at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (Qld & Magdalen 2008), Anna was Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence and American Council of Learned Societies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where she taught criminal law and Chinese law. She has also taught comparative human rights, Asian law, EU law and criminal law at Marquette University Law School as Visiting Assistant Professor.