Law and Politics in the Constitutional Delineation of Indigenous Property Rights in 1840s New Zealand

This chapter discusses the deployment of European legal vocabularies, drawn from the common law and ius gentium as a means of framing indigenous forms of land-holding and tribal authority for the purposes of the colonization of New Zealand. The author contends that policy makers and officials saw common law sources of those ius gentium as inadequate at incorporating Māori narratives as to the content and substance of indigenous customary property rights within New Zealand. The author looks at examples of how the arguments over the constitutional form of land appropriation and distribution really happened, with an aim of clarifying the political use of the common law languages and European ius gentium in the context of colonial New Zealand land appropriation