2025 winner of FMB Reynolds Scholarship to Oxford

Auckland Crown Prosecutor Karan Venter has been awarded the 2025 FMB Reynolds scholarship in Law to Oxford.

Karan, a graduate of Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington with a first-class honours degree in Law, will carry out postgraduate study towards a Bachelor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford.

His path to law and now back to academia was not traditional, Karan says.

“As a high school student, I was far keener to watch the Black Caps from a perch in the trees overhanging the Basin Reserve than attend classes across the road at Wellington College.”

Unsure what to do after high school he enrolled in architecture school, not very successfully, and then worked in a supermarket for a year before deciding law might not be that dull and enrolling at university.

Following graduation, Karan secured a clerkship in the Supreme Court with Justice Stephen Kós, during which he worked closely with his Honour on a series of substantive judgments.

Working in New Zealand’s busiest crime district in South Auckland has challenged Karan’s preconceptions.

“As a prosecutor, I am acutely aware of the differences in opportunity and the structural inequalities that have led me to represent the Crown and defendants to appear in the dock.

“While I still have significant reservations about our criminal justice system, in particular the gross over-incarceration of Māori, my eyes have been opened to the need to protect the community from defendants who pose a genuine risk of violent or sexual reoffending.

“Underlying this tension is the reality that the criminal justice system is insufficiently rehabilitative to break the cycle of offending by addressing its root socioeconomic causes.”

This intersection between the day-to-day delivery of the law and the broader questions about its effectiveness, along with questions about public power, will be at the heart of Karan’s Oxford study.

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The FMB Reynolds Scholarship in Law to Oxford was established in 2011 to recognise the support that Emeritus Professor Francis Reynolds provided to New Zealand law students at the University of Oxford for over 40 years. Professor Reynolds, now in his 90s, taught contract and commercial law at Oxford over many decades and authored the leading text Bowstead & Reynolds on Agency. He remains an Emeritus Professor of Worcester College, Oxford. Many New Zealanders completed the postgraduate law study while at Worcester College, although the Reynolds Scholarship can be taken up at any of the Oxford Colleges.

The funds for this scholarship have been made available through generous donations from Emeritus Professor Reynolds, Professor Peter Watts and Oxford alumni of various law schools. The funds are managed by The University of Auckland Foundation Inc. and the scholarship is administered by Universities New Zealand.

Further information about the FMB Reynolds Scholarship is available here