Article on Inheritance Law in New Zealand and U.S.

Hon Sir Grant Hammond, KNZM (New Zealand Court of Appeal) recently published an article entitled, Legislation New Zealand Style and U.S. Style: The Case of Inheritance Law, 30 T.M. Cooley L. Rev. 273-283 (2013).  Provided below is a portion of the article’s introduction:

Jeremy Waldron is one of New Zealand’s most distinguished legal academics. His more or less permanent home is at Columbia University Law School in New York, though he has held chairs at Oxford and Cambridge too. Several years ago he delivered a series of lectures at Cambridge that were subsequently published in book form under the title The Dignity of Legislation. Jeremy is a rights theorist and also takes a great interest in the whole question of legislation.

In this book, he ran a thesis that, wrongly, we have an idealized picture of judging and the importance of its role in law-making and frame it together with an entirely disreputable picture of legislating. He suggested we don’t have aspirational models of legislation. When we think about it at all, legislation is pervaded by imagery that presents ordinary legislative activity as dealmaking, horse trading, logrolling, interest pandering, and porkbarreling. He went on to argue that we simply have to recover or develop ways of thinking about legislation that present it as a dignified mode of governance and a respectable source of law. I cannot deal with all of this in a single lecture. I think academics do sometimes have an obligation to generalize. But on the other hand, too often discussions of that kind lack context. One can learn as much from microinvestigations, if not more, than blue-sky discussions. After all, it was probably the best ever legal historian in the common-law tradition—Frederick William Maitland—who taught us that you can understand more about the common law by closely studying the doings of an English village than talking at large.

Anyway, for present purposes, I need a context. I will set what I propose to say about lawmaking by judges and through statutes in the area of inheritance law, with special reference to New Zealand and Michigan.