Travel and learning Award for Nathan Cooper
Supporting Nathan Cooper to travel to the USA to establish networks and build connections in academia and legal practice.
Borrin Foundation Travel and Learning Award
Nathan’s plan
Climate change is affecting law making, litigation and general legal practice in many ways, while legal education (what we teach and how we teach it at Law School) remains largely unchanged. Yet in the United States in particular, emerging work on climate-attuned legal studies provides examples of developments we can learn from in New Zealand.
Nathan will use this award to establish networks and build connections with academics at Columbia Law School, Chicago Kent College of Law and Brown University, and with legal practitioners in New York and Boston. This will develop understanding of what climate conscious lawyering requires, and the implications for education. He will also share his research at the Law & Society Association Conference in Chicago.
About Nathan
Nathan is an Associate Professor at Te Piringa Faculty of Law, School of Law, Politics, and Philosophy, University of Waikato, where he serves as Deputy Head of School and Convenor of International Engagement. Nathan’s scholarship is at the intersection of human rights law, ecological law and governance, and applied legal theory in the Anthropocene. He is particularly interested in how the climate emergency and other ecological crises are challenging law’s anthropocentric assumptions and how such challenges offer opportunity to reimagine more just and more sustainable legal futures. Through his teaching portfolio, including jurisprudence, climate change law, and legal method, Nathan seeks to ‘acclimatise’ law subjects in light of climate crisis, so students leave Law School equipped with the skills and ethics that contemporary legal practice requires.
Nathan has worked as a legal academic for 15 years, researching and teaching in Europe and Africa before moving to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2018. Prior to academia he worked for a large trade union law firm in England, then managed community development projects in South Africa, before completing his PhD (University of Sheffield) on the human right to water, commons governance and water justice.
Nathan regularly contributes to media on a variety of issues, from the environmental impact of AI and Bitcoin to New Zealand’s climate change obligations and ecocide.
Grant Amount
$10,000 in 2025 to support travel
“This Borrin Travel and Learning Award will contribute to transforming legal education, supporting law graduates to be effective and justice-minded professionals in a climate changing world.”