Reason #1 to Love New Zealand

When I decided to leave the University of Georgia for the University of Auckland, I worried that my American colleagues would think I was crazy to abandon a tenure-track job at an excellent law school to join a law faculty in a country best known for sheep and Lord of the Rings (and the Nuclear Tests Case, to nerdy lawyers), especially as I was offered a similar position at an excellent law school in the UK. Happily, my fears proved groundless: without exception, the senior scholars whose opinions I solicited believed that the University of Auckland was on par with the other school and a perfectly sensible choice for a young scholar who wanted to teach outside the U.S., but might someday care to return.

Frankly, I couldn’t be happier with my decision. My students are excellent, easily on par with my Georgia students (even though they are undergrads) and passionate about international criminal law — a reflection, no doubt, of the fact that New Zealand has long been at ICL’s forefront. I teach what I want — international criminal law at the LLB and LLM levels and Law & Society, an interdisciplinary first-year class — and have an overall teaching load that is lighter than my load at Georgia, just eight credit hours per year. And my colleagues are wonderful: smart, excellent and productive scholars, and very collegial. (We have coffee together each morning at 11:00 am, something I don’t think happens very often in the U.S.!). And they are diverse: we have faculty from New Zealand, the U.S., Canada, South Africa, England, Ireland, Scotland, Greece, and — starting this fall — Egypt.

Which brings me to the self-congratulatory point of this post: Mercer’s 2007 Worldwide Quality of Living Survey has named Auckland the world’s fifth best city for an ex-pat to live in, behind only Zurich, Geneva, Vienna, and Vancouver and tied with Dusseldorf. The best Australian city is Sydney (#9), and the best U.S. city is Honolulu (#27). Rounding out the top 20 — beginning with #7:

Frankfurt
Munich
Bern
Syndey
Copenhagen
Wellington (New Zealand again!)
Amsterdam
Brussels
Toronto
Berlin
Melbourne
Luxembourg
Ottawa
Stockhom

Visitors to the fair city of Auckland are always welcome!