ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights arguments presented at the symposium by John Borrows on "Originalism and Canada's Constitution" and reflect on their relevance for the constitutional canon in New Zealand. It suggests that neither Canadian nor New Zealand jurisprudence is as free as they might hope and assume of the taint of terra nullius conceptions said to have been applicable in Australia prior to Mabo. New Zealand's Lost Cases project was an extraordinarily important contribution to legal history funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation. The project involved the systematic search for, and collation of, early New Zealand cases. Only a selection of cases was formally reported in early colonial New Zealand, but the project found many more in newspapers, manuscript collections, archives, and judges' notebooks. The proclamation of British sovereignty in New Zealand was entirely compatible with ongoing legal pluralism and parallel dispute settlement jurisdictions within the colony.
