Dr. Christopher Jenkins
Main Focus
- Indian Legal History
- Legal Transfer
- Legal Biography
- Legal History of the British Empire
- Private International Law
- Tax History
Project
Curriculum Vitae
Christopher Jenkins completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, graduating with degrees in Law and Economics in 2011. He then 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.
His doctoral dissertation (awarded the Yorke Prize) was completed in September 2017, under the supervision of Professor Christopher Forsyth KC (Hon). It examined the enforcement of foreign judgments in 19th century India. He has published on Indian legal history, taxation, private international law, and related treaty negotiations.
In early 2018 he returned to legal practice in Auckland. He came back to Cambridge in November 2019 to take up a Research Fellowship at Clare Hall. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2019. In March 2020 he 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. At Cambridge, he supervised undergraduates from several colleges in Contract, as well as Equity and Trusts.
He joined the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in November 2025.
Publications
Collected edition (1)
Jenkins, C. (co-editor, with Basrur, A.; Ruddell, J.; and Vather, S.): 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, Christchurch, The Centre for Commercial & Corporate Law Inc. (2016), xxvii, 556 pp.
Journal Article (3)
Jenkins, C. (co-author, with Pope, P. and Knott, S.): How far can litigation funders go? The New Zealand case of PwC v Walker. International Corporate Rescue 15 (4), pp. 213–215 (2018).
Jenkins, C.: 1860: India’s First Income Tax. British Tax Review 2012 (1), pp. 87–116 (2012).
Jenkins, C.: Avoidance: Penny v Commissioner of Inland Revenue. Auckland University Law Review 17, pp. 277–290 (2011).
Contribution to a Collected edition (2)
Jenkins, C.: ‘An Embarrassing Precedent’: The British India-Mysore Double Tax Arrangement of 1919. In Studies in the History of Tax Law, Volume 10, pp. 407–439 (Eds. Harris, P.; de Cogan, D.) Oxford, Hart Publishing (2021).
Jenkins, C.: 1860: India’s First Income Tax, including a new ‘Postscript’. In 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, pp. 513–548 (Eds. Basrur, A.; Jenkins, C.; Ruddell, J.; and Vather, S.) Christchurch, The Centre for Commercial & Corporate Law Inc. (2016).