November 08, 2013
Judges need lessons in lex Aotearoa
A Maori High Court judge says his fellow judges aren’t well enough educated about core Maori values.
Justice Joe Williams was delivering the Harkness Henry Speech to the Waikato University Law School on what he called the evolution of lex Aotearoa.
He says it’s a combination of the first law, which came on the waka with ancestors like Kupe and Toi, and the law of New Zealand brought by colonists from Britain.
In recent decades they started merging so that concepts like whanaungatanga, kaitiakitanga, tapu and mana can affect the way law is interpreted and administered.
Justice Williams says there is little consistency in the way these core values are dealt with in different courts.
"There is evidence that the judges are failing to cope with what they are dealing with, and that is a serious educational issue in my view.The lack of knowledge of the first law of Aotearoa seem to me occasionally, not always but occasionally, a reason why judges are making findings that they are. They are still grappling with the issues and grappling with them in a very judge-like way but the lack if undersanding and education in fhe first law of Aotearoa is seeing them come up short occasionally," he says.
Justice Williams says the law of Aotearoa New Zealand isn’t fixed, but is an evolving conversation between parliament, the judiciary, Maori and the wider public.
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