Tackling wealth inequality through law: A joint PhD opens doors

The book showed her a way to critically examine international investment law. She wrote to Professor Pahuja, who invited her to the University of Melbourne.

“But I didn't want to give up the foot in Vienna because I am fond of the very rigorous doctrinal research in international investment law that is being done there,” Dr Leiter says.

A PhD scholarship she received from the Austrian Academy of Science gave her the freedom to decide where to conduct her research. The University of Melbourne and the University of Vienna agreed to jointly award Dr Leiter’s PhD on completion.

“It was thanks to a lot of very good-hearted people in university administration who were very generous and tried to make that work,” Dr Leiter says.

Her supervisors at the University of Melbourne were Professor Pahuja and Professor Hilary Charlesworth – now a judge at the International Court of Justice – and at the University of Vienna, she was supervised by Professor Ursula Kriebaum.

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Moving to Melbourne for a PhD

Dr Leiter planned to spend her first year in Melbourne and then return to Vienna.

“But six months in, I was certain I didn't want to leave,” she says.

Coming to the University of Melbourne from the publicly funded University of Vienna, where most students receive a free education, was like entering a completely different world.

“It's a very different system from the one I came from, and it has disadvantages and advantages,” Dr Leiter says.

In the first year of her PhD, Dr Leiter lived in Ormond College. It is a residential college for University of Melbourne students established in 1881.

Relocating to Melbourne, access to daycare on campus for her one-year-old was also very important to Dr Leiter and her husband.

“The University of Melbourne gave us a place at daycare right next to the university. That was a lifesaver,” Dr Leiter says.

A law PhD at the University of Melbourne trains academic skills

Graduate researchers at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities are treated like junior faculty, according to Dr Leiter.

“You would be taken so seriously,” she says.

The department prepares its graduate researchers for entry into the academic world in many ways. Events held by the department involve graduate researchers sharing their work with a group including senior researchers.

“The first event is mega scary. The first time you share this writing with people whose book you have on your bookshelf, you think, ‘Oh my God, I'm not going to survive this’,” Dr Leiter says.

“But then you are met with a lot of kindness, generosity, praise, support and great ideas.”

The Melbourne Law School also gives its PhD candidates explicit direction in how to conduct themselves as legal scholars. Dr Leiter learned how to moderate a panel and how to ask an academic question.

“There's so much going on when people ask questions at academic events,” Dr Leiter says.

"But it's not until you start paying attention that you realise how much is in a question."

As is tradition in the Melbourne Law School, Dr Leiter’s PhD cohort received funding to organise a doctoral forum on legal theory.

“We got support from other scholars at the university to help us bring in the people that we want and help us develop the event,” she says.

Where a University of Melbourne PhD can lead

In the final year of her PhD, Dr Leiter spent the year at the Harvard Institute of Global Law and Policy. She received a scholarship from the University of Melbourne to help fund this travel.

“The University of Melbourne is a very good name,” says Dr Leiter.

Dr Leiter now works as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. She is also a co-founder of technology and ecology nonprofit Sovereign Nature Initiative.

The Sovereign Nature Initiative came out of Dr Leiter’s fascination with cryptocurrencies. She acknowledges that cryptocurrency has many dark sides with certain political values baked in.

“But nevertheless, the crypto world was able to pull a magic trick in many ways and to really empower a community bottom-up by creating their own value.”

Dr Leiter wondered whether she could use that to build more socially just futures.

The Sovereign Nature Initiative started as an art project imagining a self-governing forest. Dr Leiter and her co-founders inherited the concept. As Chief Strategy Officer, Dr Leiter works with a diverse team  to “flip the economics of ecology”.

“What would it mean to make it so that ecology and biodiversity restoration are also valued in the same way as it is actually valuable for sustaining life on earth?” Dr Leiter says.

“The challenge with Sovereign Nature Initiative was taking all these insights that I built up in my academic life on what makes money go round: what are the limitations? When is law enabling? When is law limiting? And in a very experimental field, trying to bring some of that knowledge and create something, a pathway, a line of flight.”

Learn more about a PhD in Law