Mai Chen
| Mai Chen | |
|---|---|
| Personal details | |
| Born | Taipei, Taiwan |
| Spouse(s) | Dr John Sinclair |
| Children | 1 |
| Occupation | Constitutional and administrative lawyer |
Mai Chen is a New Zealand constitutional and administrative law expert, Managing Partner of Chen Palmer Public and Employment Law Specialists, Professor (adjunct) at the University of Auckland School of Law, Director of BNZ and best selling author. She is Chair of New Zealand Asian Leaders and the Superdiversity Centre for Law, Policy and Business. She is married and has one son.
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Chen immigrated to New Zealand with her family at the age of six in 1970. Hers was the first Taiwanese family on the South Island of New Zealand. She studied at Otago Girls' High School, where she became a head girl, dux.
Chen attended the University of Otago (New Zealand) and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws Honours degree (first class) in 1986. She was admitted to the bar in the same year. Chen was awarded several scholarships, including the William Georgetti Scholarship granted by the New Zealand Governor-General, the Sir Harold Barrowclough Scholarship and the Butterworths Travelling Scholarship. In 1987 Chen was awarded the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship to study at Harvard Law School. Chen graduated with her Master of Laws from Harvard Law School in 1988 and won the Irving Oberman Memorial Award for the best Human Rights thesis at Harvard Law School. Her thesis was on the Treaty of Waitangi. Following Harvard Law School, Chen was awarded the Ferguson Human Rights Fellowship, a scholarship granted by the Harvard Human Rights Programme to be a Fellow at the International Labour Office in Geneva working on United Nations’ Women’s Convention and the ILO Indigenous Peoples Convention.
Chen interned at the United Nations' International Labour Office in Geneva in 1988. In 1989, Chen took up a lectureship at the law school at Victoria University of Wellington, and wrote her first book on the discrimination of women under the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. In 1990, she chaired a government review on the Policy of Excluding Women from Combat, and in 1992 she became the youngest senior lecturer in Law in New Zealand at that time. In 1993, she co-authored Public Law in New Zealand with former Prime Minister Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC, which was published by Oxford University Press. In 1994, Chen became a lawyer at Russell McVeagh, but left after one year to co-found Chen and Palmer.
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