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The New Zealand Law Society’s new report, Strengthening the Rule of Law in Aotearoa New Zealand, runs to more than eighty pages, includes seventy-eight recommendations, and reflects a considerable investment of time and goodwill. Its aims are noble: to bolster constitutional integrity, improve access to justice, and promote respect for the rule of law. Read more

Donald Trump returned to power with America’s highly politicised universities squarely in his sights. Within weeks of his inauguration, his administration launched a sweeping campaign targeting dozens of institutions nationwide. Read more

Resources Minister Shane Jones recently floated a novel idea: government-backed insurance for oil and gas investors to protect them against future policy reversals. Let that sink in. Read more

When does a “woman” include a biological male? And who gets to decide – Parliament or the courts? Read more

There’s a fragility to rules-based orders that has been around for as long as those orders have. So long as people generally agree that it is good to be bound by the rules, and that trying to change the rules is better than ignoring or breaking them, a rules-based order can persist. Read more

I have no doubt that Peter Smith loves the West. You can feel it in every line of his writing – the anger at its enemies, the contempt for its betrayal, the frustration at its leaders who lack the courage to defend it. Read more

Two ships passing in the night might share the same destination yet follow very different courses. So it seems with David Harvey’s latest response to my report for The New Zealand Initiative, Who Makes the Law? Read more

About a quarter century ago, my to-be wife introduced me to a card game called Flux. It was popular among the computer science and engineering students in Pittsburgh. Read more

Jim Allan’s spirited response to my Quadrant Online column, Trump’s war on constitutional democracy, misses what makes this moment so dangerous for America. While Jim and I share deep concerns about judicial activism and bureaucratic overreach, his attempt to normalise Trump’s recent actions ignores their unprecedented assault on constitutional government. Read more

Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s critique in the December New Zealand Law Journal of my report, Who Makes the Law? Reining in the Supreme Court,i is remarkable in what it fails to address.ii Rather than engaging with the substantive constitutional arguments about concerning trends in our highest court’s jurisprudence, his response amounts to ‘nothing to see here, trust the judges.’ More remarkably still, he resorts to ad hominem argument, suggesting critics can be dismissed as simply serving business interests. Read more