The Law School - Te Kura Ture

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https://hdl.handle.net/10292/10765
The AUT Law School - Te Kura Ture's primary objective is to be a centre of excellence in law and humanities research in New Zealand. The school has particular research strength in: Corporate Governance, Insurance Law, Family Law, Employment Law, Sports Law, Wills and Estates, and Media Law.

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Browsing The Law School - Te Kura Ture by Author "Fa’amatuainu, Bridget"

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    Indigenising Private Law: Lessons from Samoa
    (Matthew P Harrington, 2023-01-10) Fa’amatuainu, Bridget
    Legally pluralistic societies such as Samoa face a challenge: the legacy of colonialism, including in law-school curricula. In 2019, the National University of Samoa delivered its first Customary Adjudication programme with core topics including Legal Professional Ethics and Customary Law—a programme that I helped design and deliver. However, for the time being, indigenous law remains virtually non-existent in law-school curricula. This paper critically reviews the existing framework for the teaching of private law in Samoa and discuss how law schools could incorporate indigenous private law to a greater degree. It explores approaches adopted in the Pacific to review and reform local private law, while not pedagogical in nature, it carries potential for informing the integration of indigenous materials into the design and delivery of private- law papers. Accordingly, this paper represents a concrete contribution to the ongoing process of decolonisation in the Pacific region.
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    Samoa Law Reform and Legal Pluralism: Critical Challenges to Achieving Legal Recognition of Fa’atama and SOGIEC
    (University of Canterbury, 2023) Fa’amatuainu, Bridget
    In this article, I draw attention to Samoa'.s women'.s gender quota cases which brought into question the legal and constitutional language adopted in laws, constitutional interpretation, human rights, judicial independence of the courts and rule of law in conflict with Samoan customs. What the constitutional cases demonstrate is a more modern egalitarian Samoan legal and political system which highlights how this modern conception of justice undermines the Samoan political and legal values that traditionally begin with fostering and enhancing fundamental interpersonal relations first, because it is there that we observe the modern state or community"s most fundamental values with respect to the politico-legal realm. This article argues for a critical examination of these ongoing challenges and tensions first before considering whether the best pathway for recognition of the status of fa'atama and diverse sexual orientation, gender identity expression and sex characteristics (SOGIEC) representation is achievable in Samoa.
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    Self-Represented Litigation and Meaningful Access to Justice in Aotearoa and Samoa
    (SAGE Publications, 2023-01-23) Fa’amatuainu, Bridget
    More than a decade ago, the first exploratory study into the experiences of Self-Represented Litigants in Aotearoa (New Zealand) recommended the need for more cultural perspectives in this area of research. This article makes a timely contribution to building this knowledge base while identifying some of the gaps, attitudes, intersectional experiences and challenges faced by Pacific communities within their respective cross-cultural contexts in response to Aotearoa’s justice system. As a starting point, we explore the existing framework of self-represented litigation in Aotearoa as well as some of the key limitations to highlight how responsive it is to cultural and systemic issues of bias. This article further explicates key principles from a customary approach used in Samoa to demonstrate how it may help facilitate meaningful engagement across diasporic Pan-Pacific communities to further enhance cross-cultural litigation in the civil justice system of Aotearoa—a largely under-theorised area.
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    Talanoa Methodology in Samoa Law and Gender Research: The Case for a Samoan Critical Legal Theory and Gender Methodology
    (Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2023-04-05) Fa’amatuainu, Bridget
    The need for more scholarly reflection on alternative ontological voices and indigenous methodology serves to deconstruct the often exclusionary or one-dimensional approach to research on gender and law. The critical review on what the most culturally competent research method to employ in research about indigenous issues, by both indigenous, and non-indigenous researchers is a recent phenomenon. Samoan perspectives in gender and law research may not always be harmonious; and this diversity carries the potential to widen the scope of methodologies that can be employed in order to engage with power relations at the intersection of indigenous voices. This article examines some of the prevailing assumptions underpinning legal and gender methodology, and why such assumptions may either be discarded or used to enrich the design of indigenous methodologies in law and gender research. This article examines the merits of a more inclusive and uniquely Samoan critical theory and gender methodology (for which there is none) underpinned by fa’asamoa principles.
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    The Recognition of Pasifika Decolonial Pedagogies as Inclusive Practice in Law Schools and Critical Legal Scholarship
    (Routledge, 2023-12-05) Fa’amatuainu, Bridget
    In this chapter, I examine some of the key challenges and successes in critical pedagogical praxis from the active inclusion of Pasifika pedagogies in decolonial legal pedagogy, rarely reflected in the teaching pedagogies adopted across the six law schools of Aotearoa (New Zealand). I build on the collective experience of Pasifika Early Career Academics (PECA) engaged in both legal and non-legal academic disciplines (Fa’amatuainu 2023; Leenen-Young et al. 2021). On this view, I adopt the Cartography of Decolonization (Andreotti et al. 2015) as the “conceptual framework of analysis” to evaluate the three reform spaces (soft reform, radical reform, and beyond reform) through which I have enacted Pasifika decolonial pedagogies in law teaching. Accordingly, I argue that there is a need for more decolonial approaches adopted in legal education and the timely recognition of Pasifika epistemologies and Pasifika legal academics in critical legal scholarship, teaching and instruction of the law.
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