Yvonne AM Smith Charitable Trust Scholarship Report
I write to provide my report on my studies in the LLM programme at Harvard Law School, having graduated at the end of May 2025.
Over the year, I took and audited a range of theoretical and practical courses from various disciplines, being:
- Economic Analysis of Law;
- Constitutional Law: Separation of Powers, Federalism, and Fourteenth Amendment;
- The Role of the Judiciary in a Democracy;
- Comparative Constitutional Law (auditing only);
- CS50 and AI for Lawyers;
- Advanced Written Advocacy;
- Quantitative Reasoning; and
- Theories About Law.
For each of the above courses in which I was enrolled for credit, I received a grade of H (on a scale of LP (low pass), P (pass), H (honours) and DS (distinction, for the top 1-3 students in classes larger than 30)). I attach my unofficial transcript as of the end of my programme.
My goals were to take a mix of interdisciplinary courses, deepen my understanding in legal theory and constitutional law (in which I am generally interested and which were relevant to my LLM research paper), and further some practical litigation skills. I believe the above courses struck a good balance, and each one has been valuable to me in some way.
In particular, I found Advanced Written Advocacy and Quantitative Reasoning extremely useful practically – the former for articulating otherwise unstated principles and considerations of written advocacy, and the latter for teaching the use of statistical analysis as evidence in litigation. Notably, the use of statistical evidence in the American case studies we discussed were much more sophisticated than what I have encountered in New Zealand judgments, and I hope to be able to apply that knowledge to relevant cases I work on in the future.
In addition, I also found Constitutional Law: Separation of Powers particularly valuable despite it being an American doctrinal course. The reason is that it covered the basics of the American constitutional structure and its history in a way that highlighted to me the differences and similarities in our own constitutional arrangements. It also highlighted some merits and, in my view, deficiencies in our system that were not obvious to me before simply because we do not often think about the features of our constitution that we take as a given.
I also had the chance to learn from a few ‘big names’ in legal scholarship, such as Professor Steven Shavell, who wrote the textbook on economic analysis (and for whom I ended up doing some research assisting), and former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella.
For Justice Abella’s seminar, I wrote a final paper in which I argued that the Court of Appeal’s decision in Atkinson v Ministry of Health1 is internally inconsistent and that to resolve it we ought to dispense with the comparability requirement in the test for prima facie discrimination. I have since developed that paper into a full length draft article, which I have submitted for publication in the New Zealand Law Review. It is presently pending peer review.
I was also involved with the Harvard Human Rights Journal as an online submissions editor.
As part of course requirements, I completed a 50-page LLM paper on the constitutional legitimacy of courts making declarations of inconsistency with the Treaty of Waitangi, for which I also received an H grade. Attached is a report from my supervisor, Professor Ryan D Doerfler, on his view of my paper.
My conclusion is that as a general matter, the capacity to make such declarations is legally legitimate in light of a dialogic/collaborative account of our constitutional arrangements. This is as opposed to a strict functionalist or a subject-matter-based account, neither of which accurately describes the interrelation between our branches of government and the role of rights in that relationship. I will consider developing the draft for publication, but I would first like some time to distance myself from the draft and then come back to it with fresh eyes. The draft will need revision for a New Zealand audience as it was written for an American reader.
Finally, courses and research aside, I think perhaps the most valuable thing I gained from this LLM is having made friends from various parts of the world. It is difficult to think of any other context from which I can come away able to say that I have connected with and learned from lawyers from Mexico, Jordan, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Armenia, India, Kenya, the Netherlands, China, Iceland, Sri Lanka, Belgium, and many others, and I think I will be a better lawyer for it.
As for next steps, I have returned to civil litigation practice in New Zealand as a barrister at Thorndon Chambers.
Thank you for providing me the support that has allowed me to make the most of this opportunity; I am very grateful.
