Yvette Tinsley

Yvette Tinsley is a New Zealand law academic, and is a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in the impacts of the justice system on its participants. In 2025 Tinsley was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Academic career

Tinsley completed a Bachelor of Laws and a PhD titled Identification parades: upholding the integrity of the criminal justice process? at the University of Birmingham. Tinsley then joined the Faculty of Law at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, rising to full professor. She is co-director of the Te Herenga Waka Centre for Justice Innovation New Zealand, and researches issues such as the experience of justice processes on participants, and their impact.

Selected works

Yvette Tinsley (2021). Pale Shelter, Cold Hands: Making Criminal Justice Better. Victoria University of Wellington Law Review, 52(3), 623–642. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/vuwlr/article/view/7335

Elisabeth McDonald and Yvette Tinsley (eds) From Real Rape to Real Justice: Prosecuting Rape in New Zealand (2011 Victoria University Press, Wellington). https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/from-real-rape-to-real-justice-prosecuting-rape-in-new-zealand/

Kim R, Tyler N, Tinsley Y. "Wading through the worst that humanity does to each other": New Zealand Crown prosecutors' experiences of working with potentially traumatic material in the criminal justice system. Front Psychol. 2023 Jun 22;14:1164696. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1164696. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37425163/