It is with some pride that I record the launch last night of New Zealand's very own style guide. The Guide was launch by Justice John McGrath. A uniform guide has been a long time coming!

New Zealand's six law schools, three main legal publishers, major law reviews, and a number of courts, including the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, have adopted the guide from January 2010.

Law schools, law firms, publishers and courts have, up to this point, all been using their own idiosyncratic style when referring to legal material. This has created confusion and much time consuming work, as it required anyone writing about the law to constantly translate references to legal material from one format to another. The comprehensive new guide, its authors hope, will make that a thing of the past.

The new guide is the result of the combined efforts of many across the profession. Justice Chambers of the Court of Appeal spearheaded the project, leading a working group that included representatives from the six law schools as well as New Zealand's three leading legal publishers, Thomson Reuters, Lexis Nexis, and CCH. The guide was only made possible through generous funding from the New Zealand Law Foundation.

Justice Chambers said that those responsible for the guide hope it will quickly be adopted by everyone working in the law in New Zealand, including lawyers involved with the courts.

A web based version of the guide will be available in due course on the New Zealand law Foundation's website. A hardcopy of the guide is available from Thomson Reuters:

Recommended retail price of $16.80 + GST ($18.90 inc GST).

Orders can be lodged with the Thomson Reuters Customer Care team

0800 10 60 60 or service@thomsonreuters.co.nz

Product code is 0774.

ISBN is 978-0-86472-690-2.

I have recently returned from an international conference on children and the law. While there, I attended a number of presentations on child maltreatment and child sexual abuse. I also got my fix of the English newspapers while killing time at Heathrow Airport. This post is an attempt to reconcile the two sources of information.

All will be aware of the relentless drive by officialdom to eliminate "risk" to children by requiring those working with children to be checked or vetted. Seemingly ridiculous requirements such as the banning of all spectators from school sports days, or a ban on parents taking pictures of the children at kindergarten graduation regularly appear in the newspapers. While the practice in New Zealand appears to be only to require a Police records check (still commonly known as a Wanganui computer check, revealing convictions and pending charges) for those who volunteer or work with children, other jurisdictions have considerably more onerous requirements. The United Kingdom's Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, is as Catherine Bennett beautifully puts it, is "a law that now requires every adult who engages, even fleetingly, with children to prove they are not a pervert, and to pay for this privilege where possible" (Observer, 20/9/09).

From a legal perspective, there are real concerns about the operation and underlying principles of such schemes. While undoubtedly it is vital that those who have convictions for violent and sexual offending are excluded from working with children, the remit appears to have shifted from barring those with convictions to a much wider net. For instance, the newly established UK Independent Safeguarding Authority has as their motto "Our aim is to help prevent unsuitable people from working with children and vulnerable adults" (my emphasis).

I spent yesterday afternoon reading the Northern Ireland guidance document on vetting procedures worryingly entitled "Sharing to Safeguard: Information sharing about individuals who may pose a risk to children (my emphasis)".This guide helpfully points out that "maintaining a focus on only those who have been charged or convicted, for example, of an offence listed at Schedule 1 of the Children and Young Person Act (1968) can be unhelpful, as it often defines the individual by their offending history, rather than determining what are the ongoing risks the individual may pose to a child/children" (Circular HSS CC 3/96(Revised), p1). Further, at page 5 the guide defines "potentially dangerous person (PDP)" as "someone who has been interviewed by the police for an alleged or suspected sexual or violent offence against a child, or a serious sexual assault on an adult, or violent offence against a vulnerable adult and a case has been referred to the Public Prosecution Service for a prosecution decision (my emphasis)"

Innocent until proven guilty seems to have lost all meaning. It appears as if one could ruin another's career simply by making a false allegation of sexual abuse.

But that is simply legalistic argument.

What is altogether more concerning is that from an empirical perspective, there is no clear evidence that these vetting programmes actually reduce harm to children. The cliché that it is more dangerous in statistical terms to be in the family home rather than in a room with complete strangers has merit. An examination of the case studies or sentencing reports on child maltreatment and sexual abuse demonstrate that the perpetrators are almost certain to be related to, or co-habiting with, the child victim, and thus will not be affected by the vetting net.

Further, experts such as Professor Gary Melton are increasingly coming to the view that rather than treating all adults as potential abusers, the more adults that are involved in a child's life, the chances of the child being maltreated or abused are reduced. This makes sense. Think back to the cases of egregious child abuse in New Zealand. A common thread is isolation: not knowing the neighbours, moving address frequently, not being enrolled in childcare or school and so on. At the conference, Professor Melton shared a wonderful anecdote about a town in the United States which focused on using firemen to engage isolated children and families in a deprived community. Firemen, he reminded us, are universally respected in the community and have lots of downtime. The town received Homeland Security funding to build a new fire station. They asked the architect to build a long glass porch so that the firemen could sit out the front, and furnished it with child size rocking chairs, thus encouraging children to congregate. This, and other similar initiatives, had a measured effect in strengthening community ties and a consequent reduction in child maltreatment and neglect in the district. I wonder what the Independent Safeguarding authority would have thought of un-vetted adults interacting with children!

Above all, there are real fears that viewing all adults as potential abusers may result in what Henry Porter has termed "a toxic culture of suspicion" (Observer 19/07/09), thus depriving children of valuable experiences and learning opportunities.

Nessa Lynch

24 September

A fabulous BBC radio documentary on the new UK Supreme Court is a must for those interested in constitutional change and profound and the mostly trival matters that sometimes surround such change. The documentary blames the lack of Lord Irving's poltical skill for the ease with which the House of Lords was abolished without any real thought about what would happen next. There are also the extraordinary comments of former Law Lord, Lord Neuberger

The danger is that you muck around with a constitution like the British Constitution at your peril because you do not know what the consequences of any change will be consequences of any change will be.

For a lighter touch there are also the musings of Lord Hope over the key issue of post codes.

Geoff McLay

14 September

Just as the central government moves towards a global solution to leaky homes, yesterday the Court of Appeal delivered yet another blow to Hamlin, and the general theory, if there was one, that New Zealanders were entitled to rely upon local bodies to properly inspect buildings. In Charterhall [yet to be posted on the Courts' website] , the owners of a luxury tourist lodge had sought to sue the local authority for failing to detect defects in the construction of chimney that ultimately led to fire causing damage to the building itself, destroying chattels and resulting in lost income.

In essence the Court of Appeal could find no difference between the sort of loss claimed by the plaintiffs, and that which had been claimed but which had been denied by the Court of Appeal in Te Mata (also a tourist lodge, but one which suffered from leaks). Nor could the Court of Appeal distinguish this case from that of Carter in which the Court of Appeal had refused to all damages for the economic consequences of a supposed failed inspection of a boat by the Maritime Safety Authority:

[40] Further, the loss which Charterhall suffered was not the direct result of the Council's actions, in the sense that the Council did not itself physically damage the lodge. Rather, the allegation is that the Council allowed the lodge to be built with an inherent defect, which, some years after construction, resulted in damage to the lodge and loss to Charterhall (in other words, the Council failed to identify the deficiencies in the work of Charterhall's contractors). Whether or not such loss is properly or usefully characterised as simply economic loss (see Cooke P in Hamlin at 521), it is of the same type as loss resulting from leaky building syndrome or frodefective foundations. That is, it is loss of the same type as was at issue in Te Mata Properties. We do not see the type of physical damage suffered in the present case as justifying a different approach to that taken in Te Mata Properties.

Personally I had some sympathy with the High Court decision in which Fogarty J. had refused to strike out the claim, having accepted that such distinctions might be possible. Further there might be more to the point that the core Council duty was to safeguard the health and safety of those who might use the building and that duty focused on that obligation, might have been more within the spirit of the original building cases, and indeed of the "great" Anns case itself. What appeared to tell against such a possibility which Baragwanath J. had raised in Te Mata , was the New Zealand courts' prior acceptance that economic interests in their own right could be protected by the Hamlin doctrine. Now it seems that if ecomonic interest claims are to be rejected, so will all other claims. This risks lumping all claimed losses together in the rush to retreat from the recovery of economic loss. The judgment might, for instance, be criticised as treating the claims for lost chattels as the same kind of claim as damage to the building itself or lost income as a result of not being able to use the building. Correctly classifying the type of loss is not the real point, the real point has become whose responsibility was it to avoid the damage occuring, and it the Court of Appeal has now said twice that in the case of a commercial operator it is the responsibility of a commercial operator.

What might be of even more significance might be Arnold J's apparent acceptance that Hamlin ought not to be extended to circumstances where plaintiffs are not "vulnerable" and quite capable of employing their own advisers in the building process. Next month the Court of Appeal is to hear the appeal in Sunset Terraces townhouse litigation in which the appellant councils are likely to directly challenge the applicability of Hamlin. Those councils may find some comfort in the way the Court of Appeal discussed the Hamlin doctrine itself :

[23] As will be immediately apparent, the features identified by Richardson J go to residential properties built for typical New Zealand home-owners.

The Sunset Terraces appeal directly raises whether the owners of the townhouses were really in the same position as a typical home owners like the Hamlins and whether more have been expected from them in terms of protecting their own interests. In the end however the Court of Appeal will struggle with by far the greatest difficulty of the leaky homes cases, that while litigation against local authorities was always a flawed way of dealing with the problem of insuring new domestic constructions, it has now been the New Zealand practice for three decades. The game is afoot, whatever the Court has said about what can be expected of commercial operators, retrespectively expecting home owners to have better guarded their own interests, may just not be appropriate.

Campbell launched his new book at function last Thursday night. The book follows Campbell's course of lectures at the prestigious Hague Academy of International Law, on the topic of how to resolve the problems the result when the same or similar cases are filed with different international and national courts ought.

Today's Dominion Post has a curious story reporting that "Some leaky-homes owners are being fleeced by "cartels" of lawyers, experts and builders, according to a briefing to council bosses." The important conclusion is that " a growing number of leaky-home owners come out of the claims process without enough cash for repairs once legal bills and experts' fees are paid."

Putting to one side the issue of whether 'cartels' exist ( and the article doesn't really establish that they do), the article rather seems to reflect the rather obvious truth – that litigation is simply an expensive way of obtaining compensation. A truth, that blessed as we are in New Zealand without the burden of personal injury litigation, we often forget.

Geoff McLay

19 August

Radio New Zealand and the newspapers are reporting that the report commissioned from Price Waterhouse into the New Zealand leaky homes crisis has revealed that the potential fix up price is $11.3 billion, up from the still staggering $3 billion estimated last month.

Under the weight of such figures it appears that the National Government is prepared to move away from the current model of litigation against local authorities and solvent builders towards some kind of global settlement mechanism that would result in the central government also bearing part of the cost of repairs. The model discussed appears loosely to be based on that rejected by the Labour Government in the middle of last year.

If any evidence was needed that New Zealand's reliance on litigation to provide warranties to homeowners and to incentivise inspection was misplaced, this surely is it. Hamlin and the earlier building cases that established local authority liability may be part of the New Zealand legal canon, but good social and economic policy they were not.

Any after the event settlement system is bound to be difficult to implement. The questions are not just practical such as enabling pensioners to essentially reverse mortgage their homes to pay for repairs, but also conceptual. What will be interesting is the Minister's justification for the change in policy. Putting emotions aside it is difficult to conceptualise why investment in "homes" is different from other capitalistic investments, and why that investment should be protected when others are not. That does not mean that the Government should not come to the aid of those affected, and indeed the Government did so in creating deposit insurance scheme for those invested in finance companies, but rhetorically the government faces a challenge in explaining why it ought now to intervene. One justification might be that it was the central government failures in regulation that at least facilitated the crisis. But perhaps, in the end ,the greatest justification will simply be that the mess is too great to expect a private individuals to clean it up. Politically there will be the challenge of explaining to those live outside Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch why their tax money should be spent on fixing up problems in those cities. On the other side will those plaintiffs who believe it worthwhile be allowed to out out of the system?

Also problematic will be distinguishing between different classes of plaintiffs, either by perception of their own fault or the purpose for which they made their investment. What use will be made, for instance, of the current case law that limits recovery to non- commercial buildings.

Geoff McLay

18 August 2009