ABSTRACT
As with this account of Australian law so my [WJM] legal education. I attended law school at the University of Canterbury (NewZealand) in the mid to late 1970s. The first
year of the four-year law degree contained only one law subject – Legal System. This was a ‘filter subject’, which one had to pass along with the non-law subjects at a good grade to allow one to enter law school proper. It was not even called New Zealand Legal System. Perhaps that was as well, for it was a trawl through a set of historical events and institutions, images in words, of England. Beginning with an idea of rough and ready customs before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, we sat in the same packed lecture hall (and the lectures were repeated twice as demand for places so great) week in and week out to construct a set of notes concerning such items as Shire Courts and the Curia Regis, the Magna Carta, the role of juries (which protected us subjects of England’s great providential history from the terrors of continental torture), Chief Justice Coke’s confrontation with the Crown in which he reminded the king that the king was not above the law but partly constituted by the law, the development of the ‘spirit of judicial independence’, the glories of equity (and Lord Mansfield’s attempts to fuse equity and the common law), the development of the ‘modern’ courts (and there was a certain repugnance attached to the word ‘modern’). Students and lecturer were in New Zealand, yet we were not working with New Zealand material and it seemed as if the lecturer did not particularly like being in New Zealand (the bearing that he presented was very much of a colonial administrator having worked as a public prosecutor in Kenya prosecuting, solid rumour had it, members of the Mau Mau uprising/insurgency against British rule), but he was sure that the common law – along with parliamentary democracy and cricket – were gifts that New Zealanders ought to appreciate. Later in the year we did legal method using a mixture of English and New Zealand cases, but legal method was prefaced by legal history; it was through legal history that we were told the identity of that strange phenomenon that we were to study – the common law legal system.
