19 Finding an Act
Tracey Thomas and Theresa Buller
To find a current New Zealand Act, the best online source is the official New Zealand Legislation website.
The New Zealand Legislation website provides free public access to up-to-date, in-force versions of New Zealand Acts and secondary legislation drafted by the Parliamentary Counsel and has all versions and amendments of New Zealand legislation in force or enacted since 2008.
Students and legal practitioners may also have access via their library’s databases to subscription legal databases that provide legislation and extra functionality to help with researching legislation. Examples of subscription legal databases include:
- Westlaw New Zealand – provided by Thomson Reuters New Zealand Ltd;
- Lexis Advance – provided by LexisNexis New Zealand Ltd;
- CCH iKnowConnect – provided by Wolters Kluwer New Zealand.
Westlaw New Zealand, Lexis Advance and CCH iKnowConnect each have their own commentary (books, journal articles and online commentaries, along with additional linked material). It can be advantageous to check and compare each.
Legislation is still published in print, but it is important to check the currency of the print version as it may not incorporate recent amendments. Print legislation is still useful for locating older legislation (before 2007) and especially for consolidations of the law at specific dates in the past.
Historic New Zealand Legislation
A free website useful for locating historic, as-enacted New Zealand legislation is NZLII. There are several digitised collections of historic versions of legislation available through NZLII, including:
- New Zealand Acts;
- New Zealand Acts as enacted (1841–2007).
