Dr Christopher Jenkins
Dr Christopher Jenkins writes about the patterns and processes of legal transplantation and innovation in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
His research focuses on developments in cross-border commercial law and the evolution of judicial and constitutional structures. He is especially interested in legal interactions between British and Princely India, and the novel laws and institutions that were developed, both to resolve cross-border legal issues, and to encourage legal and institutional development in areas only ‘indirectly’ ruled by the British.
His doctoral dissertation (awarded the Yorke Prize) was completed in September 2017, under the supervision of Professor Christopher Forsyth. It examined the enforcement of foreign judgments in 19th century India. He has published on Indian tax history, tax avoidance, private international law, and related treaty negotiations. Two book chapters will be published later this year: on the role of judges as agents of legal transplantation in colonial India; and on the Indian origins of civil procedure in Anglophone Africa.
He holds undergraduate degrees in Law and Economics from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. After graduating in 2011, he qualified as a barrister and solicitor and worked in commercial litigation at Auckland law firm Russell McVeagh. He left in 2012 to undertake postgraduate legal studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Woolf Fisher Scholar. In 2018 he returned to legal practice, and in March 2020 took a leave of absence to work in Whitehall, including on the negotiation of the UK-EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement. He returned to Clare Hall in January 2024. He currently supervises Equity and Trusts, and has previously supervised Contract Law for several colleges.
Publications
Book
Ten Years of Tax: A Celebration of Professor Michael Littlewood’s First Decade of Teaching at the Faculty of Law at the University of Auckland, 2003–2013 (Centre for Commercial and Corporate Law, Canterbury University, 2016) (co-editor, with Aditya Basrur, James Ruddell, and Sehj Vather).
Chapters
“‘An Embarrassing Precedent’: The British India-Mysore Double Tax Arrangement of 1919”, in Peter Harris and Dominic de Cogan (eds), Studies in the History of Tax Law, Volume 10 (Hart Publishing, 2021).
“1860: India’s First Income Tax”, including a new ‘postscript’, in Ten Years of Tax (2016).
Articles
“How far can litigation funders go? The New Zealand case of PwC v Walker” (2018) 15(4) International Corporate Rescue 213–215 (co-author, with Polly Pope and Samantha Knott).
“1860: India’s First Income Tax” [2012] British Tax Review 87–116.
“Avoidance: Penny v Commissioner of Inland Revenue” (2011) 17 Auckland University Law Review 277–290.
