Joanna Mossop

Joanna Claire Mossop is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in the law of the sea, including conservation law, and laws outside national jurisdictions.

Academic career
Mossop completed a double degree at Victoria University of Wellington and joined Buddle Findlay as a solicitor. She then left New Zealand to complete a master of laws degree at Columbia University. Her 2002 thesis was on the relationship between scientific uncertainty in international fisheries law and adaptive management. On her return, Mossop joined the faculty of Victoria University, rising to full professor in 2022. Mossop spent several months over 2019–2020 at the Edinburgh Law School on a McCormick Fellowship. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Lincoln.

Mossop works on public international law, and has published on maritime security, and how to reconcile economic activity in marine environments with biodiversity protection. Mossop is a co-principal investigator on a 2021 Marsden grant "Reimagining ocean law to achieve equitable and sustainable use of marine ecosystems".

Mossop has been or is on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Marine Policy, the New Zealand Yearbook of International Law and the Asia Pacific Journal of Oceans Law and Policy.

Mossop was Vice President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. She is a member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law, and in 2019 she was nominated by the New Zealand government to the list of arbitrators and conciliators in Annex V and VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and was the only non-government legal adviser of the four New Zealand nominations. She was involved in the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty.

She is a part of the World Maritime University.

Awards and honours
Mossop won university teaching awards in 2018 and 2021.

Mossop's 2016 book The Continental Shelf Beyond 200 Nautical Miles jointly won the J. F. Northey Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded by the Legal Research Foundation for the best legal book by a New Zealand author.