Dr Hickford has held a range of senior management and leadership roles in the public and private sectors, including being in the Prime Minister’s Policy Advisory Group in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet for the past four years.
Prior to that, he spent eight years as a Crown Counsel at the Crown Law Office, specialising in public law, the Treaty of Waitangi, Crown-Māori relations and natural resources law.
“We are delighted to have someone of Dr Hickford’s calibre to lead Victoria’s Faculty of Law,” says Vice-Chancellor Professor Grant Guilford.
“I am confident Dr Hickford will continue the excellent work undertaken by Professor Tony Smith in his eight-year tenure, during which time Victoria’s Law School has been consistently placed among the best in the world in international rankings.”
Victoria’s Faculty of Law also ranked as the top law school in New Zealand for research quality in the most recent Performance Based Research Fund assessment.
Dr Hickford graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws with Honours and has a doctorate from the University of Oxford.
He worked as a litigation solicitor at a large commercial law firm in Auckland early in his career and spent two years with public law specialists Chen Palmer & Partners before joining the Crown Law Office.
He has an extensive research and publishing record having published on aboriginal title and customary rights as well as issues related to the Treaty of Waitangi and the history of New Zealand’s constitution and laws.
His most recent book—Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Right and the Jurisprudence of Empire—was a shortlisted finalist for the best legal book of 2011 in New Zealand.
Dr Hickford says taking up the role of Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Law at Victoria presents an exciting challenge.
“It will be a huge privilege to serve with such a world class community of scholars in a Faculty which enjoys such a great international reputation,” he says.
Dr Hickford will take up his new position on 11 May 2015.
Professor Smith, the current Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Law at Victoria, will continue as a professor in the Faculty of Law. In September next year, Professor Smith will take up a distinguished legal role at the University of Cambridge, returning to a professorial role at Victoria at the conclusion of his time in the United Kingdom.