Jacinta Arianna RuruMNZMFRSNZ (born 1974) is a New Zealand academic and the first Māori professor of law.[1] Ruru is currently a professor at the University of Otago.[2]
Academic career
Ruru completed a Master's at the University of Otago in 2001, with a thesis on the Treaty of Waitangi and national parks in New Zealand.[3] After a 2012 Fulbright-funded PhD at the University of Victoria in Canada, Ruru returned to New Zealand and the University of Otago, rising to full professor in 2016.[4]
Ruru's research centres on indigenous peoples' (primarily Māori in New Zealand and First Nations in Canada) legal relations with land and water.[5][6] She is the co-director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga (NPM) the New Zealand's Māori Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE).[7][8]
Recognition
In addition to winning the Prime Minister's supreme award for tertiary teaching,[9] Ruru has also been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.[10][11] In 2017, Ruru was selected as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's "150 women in 150 words", celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand.[12] In the same year she was invited to give the 10th Shirley Smith Memorial Address. Her speech was "First laws: tikanga Māori in / and the law".[13]
In October 2019, Ruru was appointed one of seven inaugural sesquicentennial distinguished chairs, or poutoko taiea, at Otago University.[14]
In 2019–20 Ruru was on the panel that wrote the controversial report He Puapua.
In 2024, during a radio interview on Waatea News, Dale Husband intimated that Ruru could be considered by some "an enemy of the state" due to her work decolonising New Zealand law.[17]
Selected works
Ruru, Jacinta. (2004). "A politically fuelled tsunami: the foreshore/seabed controversy in Aotearoa Me Te Wai Pounamu/New Zealand." The Journal of the Polynesian Society113, no. 1: 57–72.
Miler, Robert J., and Jacinta Ruru. (2008). "An Indigenous Lens into Comparative Law: The Doctrine of Discovery in the United States and New Zealand." West Virginia Law Review111: 849.
Ruru, Jacinta. (2009). The legal voice of Māori in freshwater governance: a literature review. Landcare Research, New Zealand.
Abbott, Mick, and Jacinta Ruru, eds. (2010). Beyond the scene: Landscape and identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. Otago University Press.
Ruru, Jacinta. (2004). "Indigenous peoples' ownership and management of mountains: The Aotearoa/New Zealand experience." Indigenous Law Journal3: 111–137.
Ruru, Jacinta, and Linda Waimarie Nikora, eds. (2021). Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface. Otago University Press. ISBN 978-1-98-859255-8