Rate My Professor J. Stuart Anderson

Professor J. Stuart Anderson is an Emeritus Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Otago. He earned an LLB from the University of London, along with a BCL and MA from the University of Oxford. Before joining the University of Otago in 1990, he was Fellow and Tutor in Jurisprudence at Hertford College, University of Oxford, from 1979 to 1990, and served as a lecturer in the Law Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Appointed Professor at Otago in 1993, he acted as Dean of the Faculty of Law for five years starting in 1993 and again from July 1999 to February 2001. Anderson has served on the University's Committee for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, as well as various other committees, panels, boards, and working parties. He is recognized for his contributions to legal scholarship, including membership on the editorial board of the Journal of Legal History.

Anderson's research and teaching interests lie in property law, public law, administrative law, and modern legal history, with a particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century development of public law and property law. His major research contributes to the Victorian volumes of the multi-volume Oxford History of the Laws of England. Key publications include his monograph Lawyers and the Making of English Land Law 1832-1940 (Oxford University Press, 1992), which examines the debates shaping the 1925 property legislation. He co-edited Oxford History of the Laws of England Volume XI: English Legal System (1820-1914) (Oxford University Press, 2010) with William Cornish, Ray Cocks, Michael Lobban, Patrick Polden, and Keith Smith. Other notable works are 'Going for the broke: Making bankruptcy law in New Zealand c.1860-1867' in New Zealand Universities Law Review (2015), 'Harris v Fitzherbert: Customary rights of labour on a shore whaling station' in Victoria University of Wellington Law Review (2011), and the F.W. Guest Memorial Lecture delivered at the University of Otago in 2008, titled ''Grave injustice', 'despotic privilege': the iniquity of the indorsement of negotiable instruments', published in the Otago Law Review. He has also published book reviews, including of Judicial review: A New Zealand perspective in New Zealand Law Journal (2010).