Ms Elisabeth Perham

Elisabeth joined the Faculty of Law & Justice as a Lecturer in January 2023. She is a comparative constitutional law scholar with interests in constitution making, constitutional transfers, small state constitutionalism, and gender and constitutions; as well as interests in public law in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand more generally. She undertook her undergraduate law studies at Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington, and also holds a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School, where she was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow. Her doctoral research (also at UNSW Law & Justice) focusses on the role of external constitutional advisors in constitution-making processes, with a geographic focus on small island states in Oceania.

Elisabeth teaches into public law subjects, and has experience as a tutor and teaching fellow in both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Elisabeth is a Co-Editor of the blog of the International Association for Constitutional Law (https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/), and a former joint editor of the Australian Public Law Blog (https://www.auspublaw.org/). In March 2022 she was a Visiting Fellow in the Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law at Melbourne Law School, and has also been a visiting researcher at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and the New Zealand Centre for Public Law at Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington. She is a member of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at UNSW Law & Justice, and is the Deputy Director of the Centre's project on Comparative Constitutional Law, and of the Centre's Project on Public Law and Public Health, as well as an affiliate of the Centre's Project on Constitutionalism from the Global South. She is an Advisory Committee member for the ICON-S Australia New Zealand Chapter, and a Co-Convenor of the ICON-S Interest Group on Constitution Making. She was the founding Co-Director of the Pathways to Politics Program for Women (NSW) at UNSW (pathwaystopolitics.org.au), and remains on the Advisory Committee for that program.

Prior to commencing her postgraduate studies, Elisabeth worked as Judge's clerk at Te Kooti Piira o Aotearoa | New Zealand Court of Appeal, as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, and as a legal policy officer for the NSW Government.