Te Aka Kōrero - News from the New Zealand Law Commission

We value your support in improving New Zealand's laws. This newsletter will help you stay up to date with the Law Commission's work and have your say on law reform.

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Ngā mihi o te Aranga.

We recently discovered that the Law Commission published a newsletter between 1996 and 1998 called Te Aka Kōrero. So we are pleased to restore the name to this, our second email newsletter.

Supreme Court considers how to remedy economic disparity when relationships end

How do we value appropriately the work of those who forgo or curtail a career to care for children and support their partner while he or she continues to develop a career? This will be a significant question in the Law Commission's review of the Property (Relationships) Act 1976.

Strangulation crime will protect women from violence

Non-fatal strangulation often leaves no marks but it can deprive its victims of oxygen and cause lasting physical and psychological damage.

We talked to Dr Ang Jury, the chief executive of Women's Refuge about the women who have been held up against a wall by their throat until they could not breathe.

Listen to more here…

Starting with a question, not an answer

Independence is a key characteristic of good law reform says Malawi's Law Commissioner Gertrude Lynn Hiwa SC.

Gertrude Lynn Hiwa joined 33 other law reform experts, including New Zealand Law Commissioner Donna Buckingham, at the Commonwealth Association of Law Reform Agencies (CALRAs) conference in Melbourne last month.

Law clerks tell their story

Each year the Law Commission is lucky to get clerking support from several students at Victoria University of Wellington's law school. We talked to two of this year's clerks, Rebecca McMenamin and Fady Girgis, to find out more about what being a clerk at the Commission involves – and why projects at the Commission take so much longer than projects in private law firms.

Listen to their thoughts here…

What makes a treasure a Taonga?

When a couple separates there may be some special items that both the parties wish to keep but that cannot be shared.

The starting position under the Property (Relationships) Act is that all property that each partner owns is classified as either relationship property or separate property. However, taonga are explicitly excluded from the Act’s definition of family chattels.

Courts continue to value Commission's work

The Law Commission wrote its 1991 discussion paper on the Property Law Act over a quarter of a century ago, but judges are still referring to it.