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Authors: Principal Judge Laurence Newhook, Bill Loutit, Marie Dysart, Stephen Quinn, Kitt Littlejohn
Published: 16 June 2017
Pages: 66

Introduction

To a degree, the material in this seminar is drawn from earlier NZLS seminar materials¹ on the subject, and while I and the other presenters of the chapters take full responsibility for the accuracy of the matters put forward, we are grateful to earlier authors for such of their work as we have adopted.

This introduction (and to a large extent the rest of the booklet) assumes that the readers of it will be people with a good general grounding in the law, with perhaps some experience in other areas of litigation or dispute resolution, but with little experience in the running of a resource management case. I consider that traditional legal training does not provide adequate preparation for resource management advocacy. Although it is not now as common as it once was, one occasionally finds advocates with significant experience in the conventional courts making a maiden appearance in the resource management field – and wondering what struck them!

The late and renowned Christchurch environmental advocate Tony Hearn QC remarked upon a difference between jurisdictions, describing it in this way: “In the conventional courts facts are facts; in the planning field opinions are facts.” That is one quite elegant way of putting it. In the rest of this introduction I shall try to tease out Tony Hearn’s insight into some sort of coherent approach. It all has to do, I believe, with a difference in the nature of the central issues.

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¹ NZLS seminar materials of March-April 2000 by John Hardie, John Milligan and Judge Whiting.

Content outline

• Chapter 1: Local authority hearings – the initial steps
• Chapter 2: Local authority hearings - the appearance
• Chapter 3: The work of the Environment Court
• Chapter 4: The filing of an appeal
• Chapter 5: Mediation and conferencing
• Chapter 6: A hearing in the Environment Court

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