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Dr Mark Hanna

05 February 2025

Senior Lecturer in Private Law

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Mark joined UC as Senior Lecturer in Private Law in December of 2023, relocating with his family from the UK.

He grew up in Northern Ireland during the “troubles” (an interesting experience that subtly influenced his outlook on life and research interests). His only real commendation during those early years was an all-Ireland under 15 Gaelic football championship medal.

He read law at the University of Essex and then taught kids in Greece how to speak English with a Northern Irish accent for a while before returning to England to complete his teacher training at Huddersfield University. 

Dr Mark Hanna

At that time already he knew he wanted to teach law at university and (somewhat naively) believed he would do a better job at that if he first qualified and gained some experience in the legal profession. He therefore sat and passed the Bar in New York (because he had seen that in movies and it looked like fun), and then went to London to work for “magic circle” law firms. After seeing lawyers in Canary Wharf sleeping under their desks and pining to ponder once again on more abstract legal questions, he completed an LLM in Public International Law at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He was then awarded ESRC funding for a PhD at Queen Mary University of London, which he completed on the subject of the role of civil society organisations in developing public international law.

He subsequently worked as a Lecturer in International Law at the Hague University of Applied Sciences, then as a Lecturer in Tort Law at Queen’s University Belfast, and then as an Assistant Professor in Media Law at Durham University, England. While in Belfast again, Mark became interested in strategic litigation and public interest speech, which remains his primary research interest today.

He is joined in Aotearoa New Zealand by his partner, Elma, and two kids, Martti and Alex. In his spare time (not much) he enjoys football (“soccer”) and very amateurish boxing.

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