2022 Visiting Fellows

  • Elisabeth Perham
    Elizabeth Perham

    Elisabeth Perham is a PhD Candidate at UNSW Faculty of Law and Justice, and will be joining the School of Law at Western Sydney University as an Associate Lecturer in July 2022. She is an affiliate of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at UNSW. She teaches and researches in public law and constitutional law, and has particular research interests in constitutional transfers, constitutional law in small states, constitution-making, and gender and public law. Elisabeth holds an LLB (Hons) and BA (Hons) from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and an LLM from Harvard Law School, where she was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow. Prior to commencing her postgraduate studies, Elisabeth was a Judge’s Clerk at the New Zealand Court of Appeal, and also worked as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, and as a Legal Policy Officer at the NSW Department of Justice.

  • Maria Dolhare

    Dr Dolhare is bilingual and double qualified legal practitioner in a civil law system and here in Australia. Since 2013 she has been an academic at the TC Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland teaching mainly property, land, and public international law.

    Her research applies critical theories and decolonial comparative law to the study of the incorporation of Indigenous-based legal principles and worldviews within constitutional texts traditionally informed by Western-based legal and epistemological principles.  Currently, her research examines how constitutional courts have interpreted, applied, and balanced constitutionally enshrined Indigenous and  Western-based notions of land, control, and management of natural resources and environmental protection to the resolution of land disputes. In the context of the increasingly lively debate about legal systems’ response to environmental, social and governance issues (ESG), her research focuses on analysing how constitutional courts grapple with the challenge of ‘reconciling the tensions between the pursuit of diversity and the promotion of social cohesion’ quite often involving seemingly irreconcilable legal principles, epistemologies, and worldviews. The aim is to shed light on some alternative solutions to issues impacting control and management over land, natural resources, and environmental protection in highly diverse inter-cultural societies.

  • Namita Wahi
    Namita Wahi

    Namita Wahi is a Senior Fellow at CPR, where she leads the Land Rights Initiative, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Law and Social Transformation in Bergen. She holds an SJD (doctoral) degree from Harvard Law School, where she wrote her dissertation on “The Right to Property and Economic Development in India”. Namita’s doctoral dissertation traces the historical evolution of the right to property in the Indian Constitution from the colonial period until 1967. Namita’s research interests are broadly in the areas of property rights, social and economic rights, and eminent domain or expropriation law. She has written extensively on these issues in various academic journals and edited volumes, as well as newspapers and magazines. Namita has taught courses in these areas at Harvard University, both at the Law School and the Department of Government, and at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.