Rate My Professor Bridgette Toy-Cronin

Associate Professor Bridgette Toy-Cronin serves as Dean of Te Kaupeka Tātai Ture | Faculty of Law and Associate Professor at the University of Otago. She holds a BA and LLB (Hons) from the University of Auckland, an LLM from Harvard Law School (2005), a Diploma in Te Ara Reo Māori from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa (2007), and a PhD from the University of Otago (2015) on 'Keeping Up Appearances: Accessing New Zealand's Civil Courts as a Litigant in Person'. Her career spans legal practice and academia: she interned at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, clerked for High Court judges in Wellington, advised on women's rights at the Cambodian Defenders Project in Phnom Penh, and worked as a commercial litigator in New Zealand and Australia before pursuing her doctorate and joining Otago in 2016. As Director of the Civil Justice Centre, she launched the National Civil Justice Observatory, and she co-directs the Otago Centre for Law and Society. Toy-Cronin collaborates with the New Zealand Bar Association, Rules Committee, and Courts Strategic Partnership Group.

Her research specializes in improving access to the civil justice system, focusing on disputant support through information, self-help, advice, and representation; dispute resolution design including the future of courts, adjudication, mediation, online dispute resolution, and integration; and socio-legal methods for civil justice research with ethical implications. Key projects include 'The Wheels of Justice: Understanding the Pace of Civil High Court Cases' (2017), unbundling litigation services, online courts, eviction consequences, and Marsden-funded research on non-lawyer advocates. Notable publications encompass 'Who are the people in “people-centred justice”? An examination through a New Zealand lens' (Canadian Journal of Law & Society, 2025), 'Access to justice and judging' in Research Handbook on Judging and the Judiciary (2025), 'The financial obstacles of access to the judge: New Zealand' in Civil Procedure: Access to Commercial Justice (2025), and 'Pseudolaw advocates: Managing advocates who advance pseudolaw arguments' in Pseudolaw and Sovereign Citizens (2025). She teaches LAWS 101: The Legal System and LAWS 350: Lawyers, Clients, and the Profession, emphasizing real-world application and access to justice.