CV / Biography
LL.B. (Hons), first class, from Victoria University of Wellington (NZ); LL.M. (“The Management of Native Lands in Canada and New Zealand: A Comparison”) from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada; Ph.D. (Cantab.) 1988 (awarded Yorke Prize 1989). Fellow of Sidney Sussex College 1984 - . Extensive publications in the field of common-law aboriginal rights; constitutional (imperial and colonial) history and historiography. Citation by courts (most recently and prominently, New Zealand's foreshore and seabed controversy (2003 -), also Takamore v Clark [2011] NZCA 587; Ross River Dena Council v A.-G (Canada) 2012 YKSC 4) and as leading expert witness for the defendants in the 'Urewera Four Trial' (2012) (billed as New Zealand's most expensive criminal trial).
He is working on a new multi-volume project Albion's Sceptre: Office and Prerogative in the Constitutional Culture of the Early Modern British Empire. During the early modern period, the British often applauded theirs as an Empire of Law. Yet for all the self-congratutory there was little our understanding of how this Empire was founded upon and articulated a sense of its own lawfulness. The book will look at the imperial prerogative and its deployment in a variety of historical (and geographical) settings and the 'presuppositions' of office by which British authorities constituted lawfulness at home and, more especially, abroad. The book will look at the intensification of office and the marshalling of emergent notions of subjecthood during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century with the rise of the fiscal-military British state. Office entailed more than imperial counter-practice to rights-based legalism iof a French and American sort but also provided a frame for the myriad streams of discursive practice of this period and their contesting, ranging from the Parliamentary impeachments of Hastings, Dundas, vilificaton of the Norman Yoke, through those of politeness and gentility. The dynamic in the history of (British and imperial) public law in this period was not that of law a higher-order, external abstraction nor driven by any modish constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers. Rather, public law thought (still mostly inside the era of personal kingship) treated law as an embodiment rather than as an abstraction. Parliamentary intervention was largely to shore up the imperial prerogative and was one sphere where (in the period between the Bill of Rights 1689 and the accession of Victoria 1837) the Whig imagery of a gradual whittling down was largely inapplicable.
Extensive presentations and public lectures in the UK and abroad (Canada and New Zealand especially), including practitioners' workshops.
Publications
Books
The aboriginal rights of the New Zealand Maori at common law (with introduction by Professor Graham Smith) (Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, Whakatane, New Zealand, 2012)
Aboriginal Title: The Modern Jurisprudence of Tribal Land Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Aboriginal Societies and the Common Law (Oxford University Press, 2004)

The Maori Magna Carta. New Zealand Law and the Treaty of Waitangi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 1991)
Articles
""Aboriginal Title: Travelling from (or to?) an Antique Land?”" (2015) 48:3 University of British Columbia Law Review 793-820
""The Crown’s relationship with tribal peoples and the legal dynamics for the resolution of historical and contemporary claims” " (2015) 46 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 875.
""Time whereof – Memory, History and Law in the Jurisprudence of Aboriginal Rights”" (2014) 77:2 University of Saskatchewan Law Review 207-240
"Sovereignty in Australasia: Comparatively Different Histories" (2009) 13:1 Legal History 57 - 92.
"Mike Taggart: In Memoriam" (2009) 7 New Zealand Journal of Public and International law 185 – 188.
"Sovereignty in Australasia: Comparatively Different Histories" (2009) 13 Legal History 55
""Sir John Salmond and the moral agency of the state"" (2007) 38 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 743-70
""’Treaty Principles": Constitutional relations inside a conservative jurisprudence"" (2007) 38 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 39-72 (Memorial edition for the late Lord Robin Cooke of Thorndon).
""New Dawn to Cold Light: Courts and Common Law Aboriginal Rights"" [2005] New Zealand Law Review 485 – 532 [published also in Bigwood, ed Public Interest Litigation, infra]
""Setting the Statutory Compass: The Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004"" (2005) 3 New Zealand Journal of Public and International Law 255-83
""What a difference a Treaty makes – the pathway of aboriginal rights jurisprudence in New Zealand public law"" (2004) 15 Public Law Review 87-102.
""Aboriginal Title in New Zealand: A Retrospect and Prospect"" (2004) 2 New Zealand Journal of Public and International Law 139-202
""Tales of constitutional origin and Crown sovereignty in New Zealand"" (2002), 52 University of Toronto Law Journal pp 69 – 99.
""Sovereignty this century – Maori and the common law constitution"" (2000), 31 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review pp 187-214 (law school centenary edition)
""The common law status of colonies and aboriginal 'rights': how lawyers and historians treat the past"" (1998), 61(2) Saskatchewan Law Review 393 - 429. Reprinted 2014 in DelMar & Lobban (eds) Legal Theory and Legal History Vol 4 (Ashgate, Essays in Contemporary Legal Theory, 2nd series)
""Law, History and the Treaty of Waitangi"" (1997), 31 New Zealand Journal of History 38-52
""Constitutional Voices"" (1996), 26 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 499-529.
""The legal basis of Maori claims against the Crown"" (1988) 18 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 1-20.
""Aboriginal servitudes and the Land Transfer Act 1952"" (1986), 16 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 313-335.
""Maori Fishing Rights and the North American Indian"" (1985) 6 Otago Law Review 62-94.
""The legal status of Maori fishing rights in tidal water"" (1984), 14 Victoria University of Wellington Law Review pp. 247-73
""Aboriginal title in New Zealand courts"" (1984), 2 University of Canterbury Law Review 235-265.
Book Chapters
"Imperial Law – the Legal Historian and the Trials and Tribulations of an Imperial Past" in Markus Drubber and Chris Tomlins (ed(s)), The Oxford Handbook of Legal History (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 883-902

"Anthropology on Trial: the Hindmarsh Island Bridge controversy (1993 – 2001)" (with n/a) in PG McHugh (ed(s)), Comparative Law and Anthropology (Research Handbooks in Comparative Law series) (Elgar Publishing, 2017), pp. 10
"A Common Law Biography of Section 35" (with n/a), From Recognition to Reconciliation: Essays on the Constitutional Entrenchment of Aboriginal and Treaty Right (University of Toronto Press, 2016), pp. 27
"A Comporting Sovereign, Tribes, and the Ordering of Imperial Authority in Colonial Upper Canada of the 1830s" in M Koskenniemi, W Rech, MJ Fonseca (ed(s)), International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 225-261
