Emma Barnes-Wetere (Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Maniapoto) explores a question she has asked of admired Māori across the legal landscape: why do we study law?

From the centre,
From the nothing,
Of not seen,
Of not heard,

There comes
A shifting,
A stirring,
And a creeping forward,

There comes
A standing,
A springing,
To an outer circle,

There comes
An intake
Of breath -
Tihe Mauriora.

Patricia Grace, Potiki 1986.

Why do we study law?

I start this piece with a simple question: why do we study law? I asked it of Māori I admire across the Aotearoa legal landscape—tauira, academics, judges. But as I gathered their stories, something deeper emerged. I kept returning to the writing of Patricia Grace. In Potiki, she draws on a Māori conception of time as a spiral, a “now-time, centred in the being,” where past, present, and future are not separate but deeply connected. In weaving together the whakaaro I gathered, I realised that much like in Grace’s writing, the stories—and the people telling them—were not isolated. Though they came from different times, places, and understandings, each story was like winds from all directions, stirring the same ocean. This interconnectedness is captured beautifully by Grace’s words, “this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined.”

The significance of stories—and who tells them—is another reason I was inspired to write this piece. In The Death of the Profane, Patricia Williams, a Black woman and legal scholar, critiques the supposed neutrality of legal writing by recounting a personal experience of being denied entry to a store, then dismissed after she named the racism behind it. When she wrote about it for a law review, her story was deemed “unverifiable” and heavily censored. Williams reveals how legal writing can exclude lived experience, privileging detachment and purported objectivity, reinforcing norms about whose perspectives are deemed legitimate. The stories that follow are our truths, our experiences, springing to an outer circle—I hope you enjoy reading them.

Ko Emma Barnes-Wetere tōku ingoa. Currently in my fourth year studying an LLB and BA, I am the first in my immediate whānau to attend university. In high school, my passion for climate justice and protecting te taiao grew strong. Leading climate crisis protests opened my eyes to how the law can be a powerful tool for good and meaningful change. That same realisation deepened as I encountered Māori literature that speaks to our experiences. While Potiki is a work of fiction, it tells a timeless and resonant story—the struggle of a hapū to safeguard their ancestral whenua threatened by developers, and the collective strength and resilience of Māori in the face of adversity. Stories like this have guided me to study law, and to gain legal skills that I can use to give back to my whānau and my people. Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua—I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past. This whakataukī grounds my journey and feels like a fitting place to begin a kōrero about why we, as Māori, study law. Tīhei mauri ora!

Kaea Hudson (Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Awa, Tūhoe) final year LLB and BA tauira, Tumuaki Takirua of Ngāi Tauira

My parents met at law school and my mum is now a criminal defence lawyer in Manukau. During my school years I would go with Mum to Polyfest in South Auckland and hand out lollipops with pamphlets about what to do if you get arrested. In her criminal and youth work Mum’s clients were the same ages as my brother and I. I remember the care she took when dealing with them — how she sees her young clients as real people and treats them like her own. None of that caring is part of Mum’s job description. But because of the kind of person she is — as a Māori and a religious person — she cares for people in everything she does. Mum showed me how the law can be a tool for doing good like that.

Aria Ngarimu (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Waiora, Rongomaiwāhine, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) final year LLB and BSc tauira, Tumuaki Takirua of Ngāi Tauira

My final year of high school coincided with the Ihumātao protest. Until then, I was aware that land injustices had occurred within the legal system, but I believed these injustices were largely historical. Travelling to Ihumātao was a turning point for me. It made clear that these injustices are ongoing—Māori land is still being taken and our voices continue to be marginalised. My best friend and I saved up for bus tickets to Auckland. We did not really know where we were going to stay, or any other logistical matters to be frank, but it all worked out fine. There was a supplies area where we picked up a tent and camping gear. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were all provided by the amazing volunteers on site. By then, tensions with the police had subsided, so it felt relatively safe to be there. I distinctly remember the group of university students from Auckland distributing pamphlets about rights when dealing with police. Some of them were Māori, and I got to speak with them briefly about their studies and they encouraged me to study law. Seeing Māori law students at the forefront of a historical event like the protests at Ihumātao, alongside the leadership of wāhine Māori lawyer Pania Newton, made me believe that I could follow that path as well. I applied not long after.

Dr. Luke Fitzmaurice-Brown (Te Aupōuri), Senior Law Lecturer at Te Herenga Waka

What came to mind when I was asked this question was not what brought me to law school in the first place but what brought me back as a postgraduate student. I had left the law, and I did not see myself becoming a lawyer, so I would not have picked ten years ago that I would be back at law school teaching. At the time, I was taking multidisciplinary child-related papers through Otago. I remember sitting in a conference with other Māori postgraduate students who were studying all these different kaupapa such as the environment, health, arts, social work, and education. Through each talk, I was thinking about how in each of these kaupapa the law is always involved. I had heard kōrero when I was doing my undergraduate degree about how the law affects everything, but it was not until that moment as a postgraduate that I saw that in action.

I think when we complete our law degrees we do not quite appreciate how broad of a skillset it gives us to support, influence and drive other kaupapa. I want to encourage tauira to not underestimate the skillset they have when they leave law school—the perspectives they bring are far beyond the black and white content of their law degree. It is not just about the practice of law itself but rather understanding how law works in society and influences almost everything in all these different kaupapa we care about and want to help. It was therefore that experience of sitting with other Māori postgraduates and realising the impact of the law that cemented my journey back into the law.

Māmari Stephens (Te Rarawa), Reader in Law at Te Herenga Waka, Māori Chaplain

I kind of fell into law, it was not the path I would have ever imagined I would go down. My first university experience was Māori studies, learning te reo, and Classics. I was a probation officer; that job supported me through the years of my study. One day, a friend of mine told me I should go on and be a Judge. I laughed and then thought, maybe, that sounds flash. There was nothing in my schooling that pointed me in that direction, it was purely something I thought about because of my experience in probation. I had a brother who had been a cop for 20 years and my mother would make banana loaves for the local police. We grew up trusting the police, so I did not think of the police or corrections as an object of study, but when I started working in the system, that was what lifted the scales from my eyes. I then met and got engaged to a corrections psychologist, so I saw the system through a different lens too. It was just happenstance that I ended up in probation. Some people will tell you they were driven by a deeply held sense of justice. I would like to say that I was like that, but I was not really. I fell into law and while I was falling into it, I discovered just how much systems can munch up people, particularly Māori.

While I loved classics and te reo Māori, I do not think I ever loved the study of law. What I felt was that law was this great big thing that I wanted to learn more about because I could see that it underpinned so much of our lives and I had no idea just how all-encompassing legal systems are. I wanted to have a better understanding of the society I lived in. Classics gave me a lot of thinking about the development of civilisation in terms of art, literature, historiography, and political history. Māori studies gave me a similar breadth, but there was stuff they could not teach me about how society is held together by its regulation of itself. I needed to know that to complete the picture, to the extent that you can never complete the picture. The great thing about law is it's always speaking, there is always an untold story. There is always something that is growing, developing, or changing about this field. You can never know everything about law or tikanga Māori, because society is always changing. It is the dynamism that continues to inspire me.

For me, te toka tū moana is Christ. I do not think we are strong enough, it asks too much of us to be rocks in the ocean. My grounding is outside of myself; it is my faith. This is because I think we are far too vulnerable, and we need to find our source of strength both inside ourselves and by clinging to each other. We need each other. No one has the internal capacity to be a rock for anyone really. We have to acknowledge our own vulnerabilities. Rocks do not have vulnerabilities.

Justice Tā Joe Williams (Ngati Pūkenga, Waitaha, Tapuika), the first Māori judge on the Supreme Court - Te Kōti Mana Nui

The following section is of an interview conducted by tauira Emma Barnes-Wetere and Mila Pivac Solomona with Justice Joe

Mila: Ko wai koe, nō hea koe?

Who are you and where are you from?

No Ngāti Pūkenga ahau, nō te kāinga o Manaia ki roto o Hauraki, engari, ko Ngāti Pūkenga tētahi iwi kua marara hoki ki te motu. He kāinga anō no mātou ki Whangārei, ki Tauranga, ki Maketū hoki.I am from Ngāti Pūkenga, from Manaia in Hauraki, although Ngāti Pūkenga is an iwi that has become spread out around the country. We have a home in Whangarei, in Tauranga, and in Maketū.

Emma: What inspired you to study law, and how has that motivation evolved over your career?

When I came down to Victoria to study, I had no idea you could study law. I came to study History and Māori. I was the first in my family to go to a tertiary institution, in fact I was the first in my whānau to pass NCEA level 1. I had no idea about law. While I was studying here in 1980, I ran into a bunch of Māori law students: Shane Jones, Anette Sykes, Rikirangi Gage, and a whole bunch of people who looked like they were having fun arguing over stuff. They were doing what we then called “legal system” which is statutory interpretation and case law now. So, in second year I shifted to do law as well as a BA in Māori Studies. When I told my old man I was going to go to university and do Māori Studies he said, “why don’t you get a trade boy?” He was a freezing worker; my entire family were freezing workers. So that is the kind of world I came from. Universities in those days were very different to universities now; there would have only been a tenth of the Māori there and almost all of them were the children of teachers or office workers—people for whom the idea of doing law had entered their consciousness. My idea of the Māori world was all factory workers. I had no idea there was this thing called “relatively middle-class Māori.” It was an awakening for me to come to university and discover that there were these people here who were politically conscientised—boisterous about who they were. Being at university was also a time of conscientising for me—it was the 80s—there was marching in the street, there was the reo, the whenua, and the treaty. Aotearoa was waking up at this time and a lot of that was being driven out of the universities.

After a couple years at law school, I twigged to something which is that law is the codes. If you understand law’s language, structures and mechanisms, you understand power, and if you understand power, you have agency, and you have the ability to affect it. There were a couple of teachers who taught me not to take what I was learning as gospel but to treat it as contestable—to argue about it. I realised that law is this fabric sitting on top of Aotearoa, and if you look closely, the fabric has got tears in it—contradictions and paradoxes. For example, who said the Crown owns the foreshore and seabed? Where is that in the law? Only a person trained in law who is not committed to the sanctity of its assumptions could ask that question. Some of my teachers at law school were the sort of people who taught me to ask those questions. Eventually, you see in a post-colonial country like ours that much of the received wisdom of law has tears or loose threads in its fabric—it is contestable. Now, that is an incredibly powerful position to be in. You do not have to be an old or experienced lawyer to contest the law, law school gives you those skills. I fell in love with that idea and still am in love with the idea that law must be a force for good, and if you throw enough energy at it—it will be, hopefully. Not always, but we have got to strive for that.

Mila: He aha ō whakaaro mō te whakatauākī o Moana Jackson, “Mātāmua he Māori koe, mātāmuri ko āu mahi rōia”?

What are your thoughts on this whakatauākī by Moana Jackson, “Be a Māori who happens to be a lawyer, not a lawyer who happens to be Māori”?

Tika tēra, kāhore e taea te karo. Ma tō Māoritanga āu mahi rōia e arahi, kei riro koe ki te au o te ao, ki te ia o te ao, ki mahi kē, ki ao kē. Kei whai atu koe i te atua o te moni, o te mana a ture nei. Nō reira, mātua ko tō Māoritanga, mātāmuri ko tō rōiatanga. Ko tō rōiatanga he mōkai, he hawene mō tō Māoritanga.It’s true, it’s not something that can be dismissed. Your Māoritanga must lead you in the legal profession, lest you be lost in the currents of the world, to other practices, to the worship of money and status. And so, your Māoritanga should always remain at the forefront, while your work as a lawyer should serve that.

Emma: How has your understanding of tikanga Māori shaped your view of the Aotearoa legal system and legal education?

Before 1840 there was another legal system in place and it did not disappear in 1840, in fact it did not start fading until the end of the 19^th century. There was no event that said our tikanga is now not law. It is a classic example of a loose thread in the fabric of the law. So, learning about law teaches you to ask those deep questions—who said tikanga was no longer an effective legal force in the lives of Māori? The answer is nobody. They [the politicians and judges in the early to mid 20^th century] just assumed that. What is going on now in the 21^st century is those deep questions are being asked by lawyers skilled in common law, statute law and tikanga Māori, for whom the assumptions of 150 years have become contestable, and you get this incremental gentle shift. That is why I fell in love with law, because it is such a powerful force for change and good. And this is why you guys are in the position to advance these incremental changes across a wide swath of activities that we could not, because there were too few of us. These things are gaining momentum because of you guys.

Emma: How can tauira Māori be “tōka tu moana”?

For me, it is always about keeping the long game in mind. For Māori law students at the moment, the exam pressure and what is going on in national discourse should not get you down. If your aim is to build the toolkit necessary to be someone who can make the law a force for good—the recognition of the treaty, tikanga and justice—then that is your toka. That means whenever you get submerged by the pressure of day-to-day life, that is what keeps you strong, the belief that you are doing something important, as part of a much bigger project, and like Kinomoerua and Apanui, you will emerge unscathed from beneath the waves. The other thing I found for me was the importance of the resilience of identity. So many of us are lost in this hyper-individualised world, totally self-focused. A strong side-wind can really throw you because your feet are not planted in the ground in which they belong. Troubles come from everywhere—and that firm sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself is what makes you strong. If you do not have adversity, it is probably a bad thing—you need adversity to know how to withstand it. I will be underwater, but then the water will go out, and I will be the rock. Being strong with whānau, hapū and iwi is also very important. I grew up away from my kāinga, and as I strengthened that side of me, it gave me a stronger sense of direction. The combination of tōku māoritanga and tōku rōiatanga. Somehow, if you weave these together, you produce this potential instrument for good—not just for a job—but to make a difference, and that is a possibility for all of you.

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