Dr Christopher Jenkins

Dr Christopher Jenkins writes about the patterns and processes of legal 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 of 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. A book chapter on the Indian Origins of Civil Procedure in Anglophone Africa will be published later this year.

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.