History will repeat itself not only for the Tauranga-based lawyer, but also for her four children and husband, who all graduated from the university too.
Mrs Mackenzie will graduate with a PhD in law today after spending the past five years writing a thesis on motherhood and family law while continuing to run Tauranga law firm Mackenzie Elvin with her husband, Graham Elvin.
The combination of motherhood and law was a fitting thesis topic for the family lawyer, who continued to practise while raising four children.
Three of her four children had since gone on to graduate from the university as lawyers, she said.
The University of Otago was as much a part of the family as law was, she said.
''We are a Tauranga-based family, but Dunedin and the University of Otago experience has been very important to our family.
''It is part of our family culture.''
It was the encouragement of her family and lifelong friend University of Otago Faculty of Law dean Prof Mark Henaghan, coupled with a sense of ''unfinished business'', which motivated her to complete a PhD on the relationship between motherhood and New Zealand law.
After becoming a mother in the 1980s she was challenged by the ''transformative power'' of the experience, she said.
''I determined to make my own way as a young professional married woman, still in the world of work, but at the same time prioritising what I sensed was my more important task, that of mothering my children.''
She did not feel she had strongly encouraged her children to study law; rather that, with the help of her husband, her children had developed a clear sense of social responsibility.
It was this sense of social responsibility which informed her own exploration of themes in her theses, including shared care parenting, relocation, imprisonment and breast-feeding, she said.
While her youngest child, Edward, graduated with a bachelor of law (hons) from the university in May, she was not ruling out a future appearance from the family on the graduation list.
Today she would celebrate her achievement with three of her four children and her husband.
Her fourth child, Rebecca, could not attend the ceremony because she was undertaking postgraduate study in law at the University of Oxford.
