Te Pae Tawhiti Postgraduate Scholarship for Rebecca McMenamin

Rebecca is undertaking a PHD research stay at a university in the United Kingdom. Rebecca is exploring how climate litigation integrates and influences international human rights law.

Borrin Foundation Te Pae Tawhiti Postgraduate Scholarship

About Rebecca

Rebecca grew up in Rotorua and spent her formative years of legal training and practice in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She graduated from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in 2018 with an LLB (1st class Hons), receiving several first in course awards, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations. Volunteering with the Wellington Community Justice Project was a highlight during these years. She also worked for Professor Campbell McLachlan KC and at the Law Commission. After graduating, Rebecca clerked for Justice Glazebrook at the Supreme Court. She was admitted to the bar in 2019 and later practiced constitutional and human rights law at Crown Law. While in practice, she volunteered with the Wellington Community Law Centre. In 2022, Rebecca started a PhD in public international law at the University of Vienna.

Rebecca has lectured public international law at the University of Vienna and taught legal writing at Te Herenga Waka. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and has edited law journals and textbooks. Presenting her PhD research has been a highlight of her academic career so far, taking her to the University of Cambridge, the European University Institute, and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting States.

What Rebecca is studying

Rebecca’s “far horizon” is contributing to constitutional development in New Zealand with expertise in international law. Her PhD brings that contribution closer. Titled “Human Rights-based Climate Litigation and International Law”, it explores how climate litigation integrates and influences international human rights law.

Her time in Vienna has exposed her to a civil-law view of climate litigation and international law more generally, as well as a grounding in positivism. With the Borrin Foundation’s support, she will study in the UK to increase her exposure to legal methodology and jurisprudence. These approaches will help Rebecca take a wider view of her work, imagining a possibility for climate justice in this area. She will also continue her doctrinal research, extending it to studying transnational judicial dialogue – whether and how courts are “talking” to each other between domestic and international levels of adjudication. 

Her work at the cutting edge of human rights law as it applies to climate change analyses the degree to which human rights law can prompt climate action, examining what has come and imagining how the law can be used in response to the climate crisis. This is important for New Zealand and for our Pacific neighbours.

 

Scholarship amount

$50,000

“It is an immense privilege to have the Borrin Foundation’s support. With it, I can more meaningfully contribute to how the law responds to the need for climate justice.”

– Rebecca McMenamin