Other Māori legal resources

Discover other resources that can provide insights into how Māori engage with the New Zealand legal system.

Māori Law Review

The Māori Law Review is a monthly review of law affecting Māori, offering a selection of case briefs, articles, book reviews and other items of interest.

In 2013 the Māori Law Review hosted a symposium entitled 'The Treaty and the Constitution'. View the papers from the The Treaty and the Constitution symposium.

Te Hunga Rōia o Aotearoa/New Zealand Māori Law Society

Te Hunga Rōia o Aotearoa/New Zealand Māori Law Society was formally established in 1988 and held its first hui at Tunohopu Marae in Rotorua. Since then the organisation has grown enormously and the THRMOA membership includes legal practitioners, judges, parliamentarians, legal academics, policy analysts, researchers and Māori law students.

Te Mātāhauariki Research Institute

The Te Mātāhauariki Research Institute website includes some very useful research material about Māori customary law produced by the team responsible for Te Mātāpunenga: A Compendium of References to the Concepts and Institutions of Māori Customary Law (VUP 2013), a critically important resource for He Papakupu Reo Ture: a Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms.

Ahi-Kā-Roa blog

Ahi-Kā-Roa blog is produced by Dr Carwyn Jones traversing current issues in the law relating to Māori and other Indigenous Peoples.

Te Mata Hautū Taketake—Māori and Indigenous Governance Centre

Te Mata Hautū Taketake—Māori and Indigenous Governance Centre is a research centre within Te Piringa—Faculty of Law at the University of Waikato, with a vision to improve Māori Indigenous Governance generally.

Te Tai Haruru The Journal of Māori Legal Writing

Te Tai Haruru is based at the Law faculty of Auckland University. The Tai Haruru team currently consists of Khylee Quince, and Claire Charters. They research and teach in a number of specialised areas, including Māori custom law, criminal law, environmental law, jurisprudence, international and constitutional law as it relates to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and comparative indigenous rights law. The online issues are available below.

The Constitutional Advisory Panel—e Ranga Kaupapa Ture

The Constitution Conversation was held from February to July 2013. Over the course of the Conversation, members of the Constitutional Advisory Panel attended, supported and encouraged over 120 hui, community-hosted meetings and independent events such as academic conferences. The role of the Panel was to listen, facilitate and record New Zealanders’ views on constitutional issues; it reported back to government at the end of 2013.

Legal Māori Project related resources

You may be interested in these resources that were produced by the Legal Māori Project between 2008 and 2010. Both resources are hosted as a part of the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection (NZETC), part of the Library at Victoria University of Wellington.

Legal Māori Archive

In 2008 the Legal Māori Project created, with the invaluable assistance of the NZETC, a digital archive of complete texts from the pre-1910 documents of the Legal Māori Corpus.

The Legal Māori Archive shows the truly bilingual nature of New Zealand’s legal history which has to date, been largely overlooked. These documents are all testament to the strong engagement between 19th century Māori and the legal system developed by and imposed by the colonial governments of that time.

All texts of the archive are also searchable as a part of this site (in the Legal Māori Corpus and in the Legal Māori Corpus Browser). However, the Legal Māori Archive offers a slightly different search experience and distinct presentation of those pre-1910 documents.

Legal Māori Corpus pre-1910 text files

The text files of the pre–910 documents in the Legal Māori Corpus can also be downloaded by researchers interested in using their own software to analyse these files. This resource would likely suit lexicographers or corpus researchers.