Jodi Gardner

Jodi Gardner is an Australian–New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Auckland, and is the inaugural Brian Coote Chair in Private Law. She has previously lectured at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Academic career
Gardner was born in Darwin, and holds a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of International Relations from Griffith University. She worked as a consumer advocate at a community law centre in Australia, and as a solicitor in litigation and banking. She completed a DPhil in contract law and consumer protection at the University of Oxford and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. She lectured in law at Oxford at Corpus Christi College, and at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Fellow of St John's College. Gardner joined the faculty of the University of Auckland in April 2023, relocating her family of seven from the UK. She was appointed as the inaugural holder of the Brian Coote Chair in Private Law, and describes herself as "a socio-legal community-focused relatively young mother of five", in contrast to Coote, who "represented the traditional standard orthodox private law".

Gardner's research focuses on the intersection of private law and social policy. She is interested in topics such as fair and transparent lending, and social welfare. Prompted by her experiences as a consumer and insurance lawyer during the Brisbane floods of 2010–11, she became interested in how private law structures can maintain or worsen inequality. She is part of a research project investigating consumer understanding of class action lawsuits and legal costs.

Gardner has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Policy, Columbia Law School, the Max Planck institute for Comparative and International Private Law, and at the University of Birmingham. She holds a position as an adjunct research fellow at the National University of Singapore.