News

November 2010

Stage Two of the Lost cases project is about to draw to a close. The team has finished entering all cases for the period 1842-1869.

Our revised methodology is available here.

The papers from the Leading Cases Conference will be published by the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review in December.


October 2010

The team has finished entering all Supreme Court and Court of Appeal cases for the 1860s. There are now over 4300 in the case database.

The New Zealand Legal Information Institute has recently posted online a database containing the New Zealand Acts 1841-2007. It is available here.


August 2010

The project hosted the Leading Cases Conference in June. Proceedings will be published in December by the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review

Professor Jim Phillips from the Law Faculty, University of Toronto, presented the second Salmond Lecture. The lecture is available to view here. A full version of his paper will be published in the special edition of the VUWLR in December.

The case database is rapidly growing and has now surpassed 3300 cases. We have recently completed entering all of the cases for Auckland and Christchurch during the 1860s. The team will now concentrate on entering all cases for the Dunedin Supreme Court during the same period.

The first two Lost Cases project case notes have been published in the VUWLR. Volume 41, Number 1, June 2010 contains R v Hipu by Shaunnagh Dorsett and R v Reardon by Megan Simpson.


May 2010

The programme for the Leading Cases Conference in June is now available and registration is open. The Registration Form is available here.

All the cases heard by the Wellington Supreme Court during the 1860s have now been entered, bringing the total number of cases in the case database to over 2000. We are now in the process of entering cases for Dunedin, Christchurch and Auckland, the 3 remaining court locations. This will be completed by the end of 2010.

Twenty five more of Justice Chapman's 1860s judicial notebooks have been indexed and are now available in the source database.


March 2010

We have begun to list cases for the 1860s. We have focused initially on the circuit courts and have completed listing all cases for this decade at Napier, New Plymouth, Invercargill. We have partially entered cases for Nelson and Hokitika. The number of cases heard by the Supreme Court increases dramatically during the 1860s and already we now have over 1700 cases in the case database.

There are now ten contextualised cases from the 1840s available. Fuller versions of R v E Hipu and R v Margaret Reardon will be published in the second edition of the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review in 2010.

The programme has been confirmed for the upcoming Leading Cases conference at Victoria University. It will be posted shortly on the Law Faculty's website.


December 2009

The project has currently completed listing all Supreme Court cases for the 1840s and 1850s. The case database now contains over 1000 individual case records.

Victoria University will be hosting a New Zealand Leading Cases conference on 25-26 June 2010. More information will be posted shortly. We are also pleased to announce that Professor Jim Phillips from the University of Toronto will be presenting the second Salmond Lecture on Thursday 24 June.

Team members have begun to contextualise key cases from the 1840s. Currently there are six cases available on the website. More detailed case notes will be published in the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review in 2010.

All relevant ordinances and acts from the 1840s and 1850s are now available online in PDF form. Acts from the 1860s and 1870s will be added shortly.