Rate My Professor John Dawson

Emeritus Professor John Dawson, BA(Hons) LLD (Otago), LLM (Harvard), is a distinguished legal scholar in the Faculty of Law at the University of Otago, with primary research interests in mental health law, law governing research, Te Tiriti o Waitangi / Treaty of Waitangi settlements, public law, and socio-legal research. The core focus of his scholarship is the law governing involuntary psychiatric treatment and legal relations between mental health professionals and their clients, examined through law texts and fieldwork within mental health services, frequently in collaboration with health professionals and social scientists. He directed the Otago Community Treatment Order Study on involuntary outpatient psychiatric treatment, funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the New Zealand Law Foundation. He has published extensively in law and psychiatry journals via international interdisciplinary collaborations and contributed to law reform efforts.

Educated at the University of Otago, where he graduated in 1973 with a BA Honours in Politics and a Law Honours degree, and at Harvard University for his LLM, Professor Dawson began his career at the Mental Health Foundation in Auckland, researching the Mental Health Act and advocating reforms. He returned to the Otago Faculty of Law in 1990, was appointed Professor with an inaugural lecture in 2007, taught as a visitor at McGill University in Montreal and the University of Toronto, and helped establish the Master of Bioethics and Health Law programme. In 2002, he held the New Zealand Law Foundation International Research Fellowship, and in 2011 received an LLD from Otago for his mental health law publications. He retired in April 2023 as Emeritus Professor, continuing PhD supervision and Law Commission advice on mental capacity laws. Key works include co-editing Mental Capacity Law in New Zealand (Thomson Reuters, 2019), chapters on its general principles and CRPD implications, 'The content of Mental Health Advance Preference statements (MAPs)' (International Journal of Law & Psychiatry, 2020), 'The Australasian approach to the definition of mental disorder in a Mental Health Act' (Medical Law Review, 2018), and Community Treatment Orders: International Comparisons (2005).