Mamari Stephens


Mamari Stephens is a law academic best known for her work creating He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Maori Legal Terms, a Māori-English a bi-lingual dictionary of legal terms. She is of Te Rarawa descent. In November 2019 she was ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia.
Stephens has a background in classics and law at Victoria University of Wellington, where she is currently a Reader in Law.

Legal Māori Project

Led by Stephens and Mary Boyce of University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, this FRST-funded project created the first ever Māori-English bi-lingual dictionary of legal terms, He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Maori Legal Terms. The project involved digitising historical texts, and many of the texts old enough to be out of copyright were released by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. The other outputs of the Legal Māori Project, including the dictionary, corpus and corpus browser, are all available at as a part of the Māori Law Resource Hub, Te Pokapū Reo Ture.

Selected publications