BCA LLB(Hons) PhD(Well)Contact
Tel +64 3 479 4961
Office: Richardson Building, 8th Floor, 8N6
Email maria.hook@otago.ac.nz
Teaching
Maria currently teaches Private International Law, International Law, International Litigation and Dispute Settlement, and the Law of Torts.
Research interests
Maria's primary research interest is private international law (the conflict of laws), which is the law dealing with civil cross-border matters. She is the co-author of New Zealand's first comprehensive text on the subject, The Conflict of Laws in New Zealand (LexisNexis, 2020), and she is an editor of the online platform The Conflict of Laws in New Zealand.
The Conflict of Laws in New Zealand website
Maria's work ranges widely across the different functions of the conflict of laws. She is very interested in the methodological framework that shapes the resolution of conflict of laws problems, and she has written comprehensively on the role of party autonomy in choice of law (The Choice of Law Contract (Hart, 2016)). She often takes an internationalist approach to her research, covering both common law and civil law jurisdictions.
Background
Prior to joining the Faculty in 2014, Maria was a judges' clerk at the High Court of New Zealand and worked as a Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, where she also completed her PhD.