About This Book
This book is designed to support students undertaking legal studies and contribute to developing research skills in New Zealand law schools.
Essential Legal Research Skills in Aotearoa New Zealand is organised into six parts:
- Part 1: The New Zealand Legal System briefly introduces the two New Zealand legal systems: tikanga Māori and state law.
- Part 2: Research Skills introduces the concept of legal research, identifies the key sources of legal information and emphasises the importance of researching strategically.
- Part 3: Case Law provides an introduction on how to locate cases by citation or topic and how to judge a case’s reliability.
- Part 4: Legislation helps students learn about the parliamentary process, how to find legislation and the materials used for statutory interpretation.
- Part 5: Secondary Sources focuses on the role of secondary sources in legal research.
- Part 6: The New Zealand Law Style Guide assists students in using the New Zealand-specific legal referencing style.
This book is general in nature and is designed to be institution and database neutral. The authors acknowledge tikanga as a source of law in Aotearoa New Zealand and hope to expand this content with te ao Māori expertise in a future edition of this book.
The book is shared under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence unless otherwise noted and can be adopted as is or adapted to suit the needs of other authors, law schools or institutions.
Attribution
This book is gratefully attributed as being an adaptation of Legal Research Essentials by the University of Queensland Library, Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide: 2023 Edition, Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide: 2024 Edition and Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide (2025 update) all of which are available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International Licence.
- Part 2: Research Skills has been adapted from the guides Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide: 2023 Edition and Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide (2025 update) along with the document UC Library “Introduction to Legal Research” (January 2025) to include content that reflects the New Zealand legal system.
- Part 3: Case Law has been adapted from the guide Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide: 2023 Edition to reflect New Zealand’s judicial structure and law report publications.
- Part 4: Legislation has been adapted from the guide Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide: 2023 Edition and the document UC Library “Finding New Zealand Legislation” (January 2025) to reflect the unicameral New Zealand Parliament and its legislative material. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives for permission to reproduce the diagram “How a bill becomes law”.
- Part 5: Secondary Sources has been adapted from the guide Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide: 2023 Edition to include New Zealand content and examples.
- Part 6: The New Zealand Law Style Guide has been adapted from the document UC Library “Using the New Zealand Law Style Guide” (January 2025) and expanded to include further examples of referencing using the New Zealand Law Style Guide.
