Tikanga Isn’t a Legal System — And Never Was.
Tikanga is a set of cultural customs, values, and spiritual concepts. But it is not — and never has been — a coherent, enforceable system of law. Before 1840, different iwi followed different practices. There were no nationwide rules, no courts with binding authority, no precedent, and no uniform legal principles. Disputes were settled through status, utu, and kinship — not law in the modern sense.
Trying to retrofit tikanga into the common law doesn’t honour heritage. It injects uncertainty. Tikanga varies by iwi, region, and even family. Lawyers cannot apply “the tikanga position” when dozens of positions exist. Courts cannot enforce spiritual concepts without picking winners.
A functioning legal system cannot run on “ask the right kaumātua.”
If It’s So Essential, Why Force It?
We’re told students are enthusiastic. If so, why the compulsory paper? Compulsion signals weakness, not strength. Subjects with inherent academic value thrive on their own merit. Ideological projects get mandated.
Tikanga is compulsory because its champions want to reshape the profession’s worldview — not because the practice of law requires it.
Courts Have Not Turned Tikanga Into a New Branch of Law
Supporters claim the Supreme Court has “brought tikanga into the common law.” Not so. Courts refer to tikanga when legislation demands it, or when it provides cultural background. That’s not the same as turning tikanga into binding legal doctrine.
A judge citing tikanga doesn’t make it law — any more than quoting Shakespeare turns Hamlet into a statute.
Tikanga cannot be converted into uniform national rules without hollowing it out.
Law Needs Clarity — Not Spiritual Ambiguity
Law relies on predictable rules, national consistency, and equal treatment. Tikanga relies on context, relationships, iwi-specific authority, and spiritual ideas like wairua and mauri. These concepts are meaningful culturally but impossible to enforce uniformly as law.
Teaching tikanga as culture is fine. Teaching it as law is not.
The Real Risk: Weakening the Profession
New Zealand needs lawyers who can draft contracts, interpret statutes, argue evidence, and understand property law. Replacing core legal training with compulsory cultural instruction risks producing graduates fluent in slogans but shaky in fundamentals.
A lawyer who knows the right karakia but can’t write a trust deed isn’t serving Māori — or anyone.
Compulsory tikanga isn’t progress.
Students can choose to explore tikanga if they want to — but forcing it into the curriculum erodes legal clarity and cultural integrity. It doesn’t build a justice system that reflects everyone.
It creates one where universal law gives way to cultural preference — and where certainty is sacrificed for symbolism.
Compulsory tikanga isn’t progress. It’s the slow replacement of legal principle with political ideology — and New Zealand deserves better.
Source: Facebook
Trying to retrofit tikanga into the common law doesn’t honour heritage. It injects uncertainty. Tikanga varies by iwi, region, and even family. Lawyers cannot apply “the tikanga position” when dozens of positions exist. Courts cannot enforce spiritual concepts without picking winners.
A functioning legal system cannot run on “ask the right kaumātua.”
If It’s So Essential, Why Force It?
We’re told students are enthusiastic. If so, why the compulsory paper? Compulsion signals weakness, not strength. Subjects with inherent academic value thrive on their own merit. Ideological projects get mandated.
Tikanga is compulsory because its champions want to reshape the profession’s worldview — not because the practice of law requires it.
Courts Have Not Turned Tikanga Into a New Branch of Law
Supporters claim the Supreme Court has “brought tikanga into the common law.” Not so. Courts refer to tikanga when legislation demands it, or when it provides cultural background. That’s not the same as turning tikanga into binding legal doctrine.
A judge citing tikanga doesn’t make it law — any more than quoting Shakespeare turns Hamlet into a statute.
Tikanga cannot be converted into uniform national rules without hollowing it out.
Law Needs Clarity — Not Spiritual Ambiguity
Law relies on predictable rules, national consistency, and equal treatment. Tikanga relies on context, relationships, iwi-specific authority, and spiritual ideas like wairua and mauri. These concepts are meaningful culturally but impossible to enforce uniformly as law.
Teaching tikanga as culture is fine. Teaching it as law is not.
The Real Risk: Weakening the Profession
New Zealand needs lawyers who can draft contracts, interpret statutes, argue evidence, and understand property law. Replacing core legal training with compulsory cultural instruction risks producing graduates fluent in slogans but shaky in fundamentals.
A lawyer who knows the right karakia but can’t write a trust deed isn’t serving Māori — or anyone.
Compulsory tikanga isn’t progress.
Students can choose to explore tikanga if they want to — but forcing it into the curriculum erodes legal clarity and cultural integrity. It doesn’t build a justice system that reflects everyone.
It creates one where universal law gives way to cultural preference — and where certainty is sacrificed for symbolism.
Compulsory tikanga isn’t progress. It’s the slow replacement of legal principle with political ideology — and New Zealand deserves better.
Source: Facebook
7 comments:
And when vague tikanga is taught, it is taught the same at university as at kindergarten. A really really low level of intellectual engagement. All Maori related courses should be taught in Maori Studies and none of them compulsory. Comparatively low enrollments would require cross subsidization. Every thinking person knows that.
You know what I’m tired of? This idea that teaching tikanga in law school somehow destroys the rule of law. Please. Tikanga isn’t a threat to the justice system, it’s a fact of life in New Zealand. If you’re practising law here and you don’t understand it, you’re the one who’s out of your depth. Every major case now involves some recognition of Māori interests. Pretending otherwise is like pretending we still live in the days of black robes and dusty parchment. It’s not about ideology. It’s about being competent in the country you actually live in.
And this line about “if it’s so good, why make it compulsory”? Come on. We make the important stuff compulsory because everyone needs to know it. No one complains about being forced to learn contract law. But suddenly when it’s tikanga, it’s political? The truth is, the loudest critics just don’t like the idea of the next generation understanding something they never bothered to learn. Law moves forward. Society moves forward. If that makes a few people uncomfortable, maybe that says more about them than it does about the law schools.
@Anon 7.00am - No one is saying lawyers should be ignorant of tikanga. The issue is the bait-and-switch from teaching about tikanga as a social and evidential reality to treating it as a normative source of law that students must absorb or affirm. Those are not the same thing.
Understanding how courts consider Māori interests does not mean tikanga suddenly sits alongside statute and precedent as an open-ended authority — and pretending that distinction doesn’t matter is exactly the problem.
The “we make important things compulsory” line collapses on contact with reality. Contract law is compulsory because it’s settled, general, and universally binding. Tikanga is plural, contested, iwi-specific, and evolving — there is no single neutral version to mandate without imposing an ideology. This isn’t fear of learning or “discomfort with progress”; it’s resistance to turning legal education into belief training.
Law moves forward by drawing clearer lines, not by pretending boundaries don’t exist.
Lovely response by Anon 1009 - as a result of reading it I scrubbed my own embryonic riposte as Anon 1009 has already covered those points and done it so well!
Just one additional thought here......... correct me if I am mistaken but I gather tikanga varies from tribe to tribe. The only possible application it could have in law is at intra-tribal level in disputes over traditional or customary matters.
As a matter of interest and not entirely irrelevant to this discussion, PNG officially recognises customary law and allows local village courts to apply it, PROVIDING there is no conflict with written law. I recall one case back in the 1980s when two warring clans decided to make peace through an exchange of brides, a traditional/customary practice. However, someone cried foul and the matter went to the highest court in the land which held that customary law could not be applied in matters covered by national written law, in this instance pertaining to the right to choose a marital partner.
Calling contract law “settled” is a bit rich when it took decades of argument, litigation, and reform to get it there. Every principle you now treat as solid ground was once contested, shaped by thousands of cases, rewritten by generations of judges, and torn apart by social and economic change. Claiming tikanga is too plural or unsettled to belong in legal education ignores that your own legal canon only looks stable because it has had the privilege of time, power, and repetition. Tikanga has not had that luxury, not because it lacks coherence, but because it has been dismissed and excluded by the very system that now claims it is not ready.
Law does not advance by freezing one worldview in amber and calling it neutral. It evolves through challenge, contradiction, and the courage to test what is taken for granted, exactly the process that built your beloved contract law. The fear here is not about ideology, it is about losing the pretence of universality. Recognising tikanga in legal training is not belief instruction, it is an overdue admission that law in Aotearoa has always been more than the subset of rules imported to serve one culture’s convenience.
@Anonymous 11.00am - Contract law didn’t become “settled” by asserting moral authority or cultural legitimacy — it became settled through adversarial testing, precision, and universal application. Its principles survived because they were forced to operate independently of identity, binding everyone the same way. Tikanga isn’t being criticised for lacking time or “privilege”; it’s being questioned because it is explicitly plural, context-dependent, and authority-based rather than rule-based. That makes it a subject for anthropology or history — not a substitute framework for a modern legal system that depends on predictability, consent, and equal standing before the law.
And no, this isn’t about freezing a worldview or defending “imported” rules. It’s about resisting the move to smuggle normative commitments into legal education under the banner of inevitability. Teaching about tikanga is one thing; requiring students to treat it as a co-equal legal source is another. Law advances by refining common rules that apply to all citizens, not by fragmenting authority along cultural lines. The universality being challenged here isn’t a pretence — it’s the only reason law works at all.
At a grass roots level, I’d say tikanga is about as relevant to law as matauranga is to science - square pegs, round holes. If students really feel these subjects are of value to them in the 21st century, then offer optional courses through Maori Studies or anthropology departments - and see what the uptake looks like. The only reason why anyone would try to force fit them into law and science is to chase $$$s, power, influence. It’s a total con.
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