Speech
Legal Research Foundation AGM
Ladies and Gentlemen, I greet you in the languages of the realm of New Zealand - English, Maori, Cook Island Maori, Niuean, Tokelauan and Sign Language.
Greetings,Kia Ora, Kia Orana, Fakalofa Lahi Atu, Taloha Ni and (Sign)
May I acknowledge you President of the Legal Research Foundation, Justice Raynor Asher, Your Honours otherwise notably Dame Sian Chief Justice, Members and Friends of the Foundation.
Thank you for the warm welcome, and for the invitation to speak at the conclusion of the formal part of the Annual General Meeting for the Legal Research Foundation, the only break with long tradition being that it takes place away (this year) from the genial room with wonderful levels and corners in the Old Government House at the University nearby.
In every New Zealand setting, whoever speaks ought first to establish their place to stand before the audience.
In this regard, I speak first in answer to the invitation as erstwhile Governor-General. It is by virtue of that appointment that I am joining an LRF tradition for such named to address the Legal Research Foundation at an AGM.
My immediate predecessor, Dame Silvia Cartwright spoke in May last year, just three or so months before concluding her term. Her address canvassed New Zealand's constitutional journey, and the role of the Governor-General.
The Foundation was also addressed by Sir Michael Hardie Boys, in April 1997. when he spoke in honour of Lord Cooke of Thorndon.
I am happy to have an opportunity to address the Legal Research Foundation early in my term. Not at all least, because it furnishes a pleasing opportunity to reconnect with many old friends and colleagues.
I would like to focus on an aspect of the Legal Research Foundation which relates directly to my own earliest involvement with the Foundation as a Council member. That is the Foundation's connection with University of Auckland law students, and the ongoing influence of students on its activities.
I am thus speaking as Governor-General, but also as a former AucklandUniversity law student and former student member of the Foundation Council from 1968 until 1970.
From those first encounters with the Foundation as a student, I have maintained a continuing interest, from the sideline, in the affairs of the Foundation. That association is not untypical of former student members, many of whom remain thus peripherally involved with the Foundation through many years.
The Legal Research Foundation is a 43-year-old institution with legal research and law reform as objectives. Its genesis began shortly before an inaugural conference on law reform in 1965 organised by students, which was later deemed a highly successful event.
The Foundation's mid 1960s ideals are true today - those of servicing the profession, and nurturing research in law and sourcing reform.
Founded, then, by students, the Legal Research Foundation came to be a major influence on a number of branches of law in New Zealand as a joint enterprise between students, their teachers, practitioners, legislators and the judiciary.
In a sense, the child was progenitor of those who later fathered the laws. Likewise the progenitor of those who pleaded and adjudicated in the courts, and who also actually helped make the laws.
As to the last mentioned law makers, I refer of course to those such as Paul East, Doug Graham, Margaret Wilson, David Lange and Jim McLay. All were former students involved in some way with the Legal Research Foundation in its early years - students who later went on to become leading Parliamentarians and who remained in some way connected with the Foundation's work.
I think there is little doubt that the experiences and skills acquired through their involvement with the Foundation helped shape the public successes they later became. Their involvement has also served to set a strong precedent for the students who came to join the Foundation in later years - and followed in their footsteps.
American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote of the inspiration significant people can be to those who follow:
Lives of great men all remind us
we can make our lives sublime
and, departing, leave behind us
footprints on the sands of time
The two students who actually founded the Foundation were early 1960s law students - Peter Neil and Peter Skelton.
I am advised the Foundation recently honoured Peter Skelton with its life membership. Peter Neil, however, was since claimed by the vastness of Australian practice and no one seems able to trace him although he was a singular person who, I think, literally thought he could walk on water - forgetting about the people under the surface holding the pane of glass to enable him to do so.
To each of these first two students - Peter and Peter a special debt is owed.
Other students in on the early act were Ken Palmer - who is still very active in law teaching, David Williams - "Rhodes" that is, Richard Sutton, Emeritus Professor of Law at Otago. Mention of David Williams gives rise to some brief anecdotage of my LRF Council time which I shared with David Abbott and the late Trevor Gould in 1968 plus. The main driver was David Williams and the President, Dr Roy McElroy, who lost the Auckland mayoralty in late 1968 and to whom Jack Northey made an offer he couldn't refuse. Roy was remarkably tribal and remarkably forgetful. I used to be highly amused going to his office at McElroy Duncan and Preddle with cheques to sign and letters to sign because we had a major project on of a Conference entitled Legal Education for the Future which ran in April 1969. Dr McElroy was one of those people who needed constant reinforcement. He would ask questions like "This is a good thing the Foundation isn't it?" And for some reason alongside McElroy's Auckland Grammar, AucklandUniversity, LondonUniversity, our leader David Williams was Mt Albert Grammar and HarvardUniversity. McElroy would ask me questions like "Williams is this bright young person at Russell McVeagh isn't he?"
For the notional historian at least, the Dean, Professor Jack Northey, needs to be mentioned with appropriate deference because his imprimatur was needed for almost anything and for it to work the Foundation needed to be 'another of the houses that Jack built'.
Characteristically too, and worthy of note from my viewpoint, Jack ensured that student representation was always strong on the Foundation's governing Council.
That important student representation, I am pleased to note, continues today, with provision for three student representatives on the Council. I have been advised that these students each continue to work as hard within the Foundation as they do at their studies and their paid employment.
The Foundation's flagship publication, Recent Law, which metamorphosed into the prestigious New Zealand Law Review, was also the brainchild of a student - albeit a middle-aged and perennial LLM student, John Aneas Byron O'Keefe.
Byron, whom I can never think of in any better way that Bernard Brown's fond (I add) description of him as a benevolent leprechaun, remained connected with the Foundation for as long as Jack Northey.
Another extraordinary feature of the input by law students over the years is that many returned to the Foundation's Council.
Four returned as directors of research - David Vaver (now Reuters Professor of Intellectual Property at Oxford), Raynor Asher (now of the High Court and President of the Foundation), Bruce Gray QC, and the Foundation's current Director Roger Partridge.
The list of other former students who became Council members and major supporters of the Foundation reads like a Who's Who of New Zealand's public, political and judicial world.
I hesitate to list them for fear of leaving someone out. Suffice to say that the Foundation has clearly help set many law students on a path to professional success.
One esteemed person though calls for mention who was active in the Foundation's affairs as a student. The Hon Margaret Wilson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, typifies the Foundation's links with the Law Faculty's former students.
While a junior lecturer, she was appointed to the Council at a very rare time of tensions between a couple of its members, going back, we were advised, to the early 1930s.
A souvenir issue of The Northern Club, written for the Foundation's 40th celebrations and titled Into the Roaring Forties, describes Margaret's approach to this tension:
Margaret, a prime mover in women's rights (and earlier a successful advocate for better conditions for law clerks), had no time for bickering and at the second or third meeting sorted the personalities-clash with some well-chosen words. Life on the Council became a lot pleasanter and normal services resumed.
Margaret's straight-talking sorted things out in no time. As we all know, she has gone on to employ similar skills as President of the Labour Party and, in a testing environment, as Speaker of the House.
True to the genesis of the Foundation following the law reform conference in 1965, the written research of former and current students still illuminates the pathways to possible law reform.
A perfect illustration is recorded in the Minutes of last year's AGM. A 2006 Foundation writing award went to a student representative on the Council, Paul Paterson, for a trail-blazing paper on the duty to Give Reasons in Administrative Decision Making.
Shortly thereafter, the Foundation published Hon Sir Thomas Thorp's currently pertinent study of Miscarriages of Justice and his proposed remedy.
Sixty years of law student history at AucklandUniversity separates the careers of Sir Thomas and Paul Paterson. It is refreshing to note, however, that it is the Legal Research Foundation that unites these former students in exposing to public view their research on law reform proposals.
Mention of one person remains and it has ( I must say) been worth accepting this evening's invitation to be able to say this. There is a Samoan proverb that goes "Ua o gatasi le futia ma le umele". Translated this says:-
"While the fisherman swings the rod the others must assist him by paddling hard".
May I say with respect, Bernard Brown, that you have been this organisation's "fisherman" carefully husbanding its future and in a quiet but certain fashion, making sure its catches have been sufficient and of sufficient quality- and it has been a pleasure for so many of us, from time to time, to assist you to the best of our ability.
In this spirit, I would like to congratulate the Legal Research Foundation for 43 years of eminent work. Not only has it made an extraordinary contribution to New Zealand's legal landscape, it has provided an important forum for some of our most talented law students to develop the necessary dexterity to set themselves on a path to higher professional achievement.
I began speaking in all the New Zealand realm languages. May I close by speaking in Maori issuing greetings and wishing you good health and fortitude in your endeavours.
No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, kia ora, kia kaha, tena koutou katoa