Dr Elisabeth Perham

Elisabeth is a Lecturer in the School of Global and Public Law in the UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice. 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, and a PhD in Law from UNSW. Her doctoral research focussed 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 taught 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 and former Deputy Director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at UNSW Law & Justice, and is the Co-Director of the Centre's project on Comparative Constitutional Law. She is an Executive Committee member for the ICON-S Australia New Zealand Chapter, and a Co-Convenor of the ICON-S Interest Group on Constitution Making. She is a founding Co-Director of the Pathways to Politics Program for Women (NSW) at UNSW (pathwaystopolitics.org.au).

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.