Author Description

"The first edition of this book was published in 2014 as the New Zealand Legal Method Handbook. In the second edition, published in 2018 as New Zealand Law: Foundations and Method, the content was expanded to include material relevant to the Legal Foundations course that the Auckland Law School introduced in that year, while recognising that this would also be of relevance to all students studying first-year law at any of the six New Zealand law schools. Now, for this third edition, not only have the previous chapters all been updated to reflect developments in the law since 2018, but there is considerable new material in response to the decision of the New Zealand Council of Legal Education (NZCLE) to include Tikanga Maori Requirements within the law degrees. "Tikanga Maori Requirements" means a requirement that the LLB and LLB(Hons) degree programmes include teaching and assessment of the general principles and practices of tikanga Maori I Maori laws and philosophy, and a requirement that the examination subjects of the degree include the course in tikanga Maori I Maori laws and philosophy. These mandatory requirements apply to all students beginning their law studies in 2025 or later. The authorship team of Mary-Rose Russell and Stephen Penk, who co-authored the first and second editions, has now been joined by Jayden Houghton (Rereahu Maniapoto), a Senior Lecturer and Assistant Dean at the Auckland Law School, whose research focuses on tino rangatiratanga, matauranga Maori and taonga, and tikanga Maori and state law, and who is well placed to contribute the additional material relevant to the new NZCLE requirements. The title of the book now includes "Aotearoa", reflecting the dual nature of the Aotearoa New Zealand legal systems. As with the earlier editions, our aim with Aotearoa New Zealand Law: Foundations and Method has been to take a different approach from other introductory law texts by presenting complementary resources for (a) understanding the New Zea