Community role in law ‘vital’

Press, 27 April 1984, Page 7

Community role in law ‘vital’

PA Rotorua Lawyers should take note of the community’s awakening awareness that it had a vital contribution to make to the legal system, says the Governor-General, Sir David Beattie. Opening the Law Society’s triennial conference in Rotorua, Sir David said that the Law Society by its very nature had a responsibility, even a duty, to be a guiding influence on not only law makers but on a growing sense of responsibility and good intent within the community. “They must be encouraged to become familiar with all the aspects of our legal system, to trust it, to help improve it, to take part in its functions where they can, and to promote the many areas of its activities.” Sir Davir said that one change that had taken place in New Zealand society was within families. A District Court judge at a recent seminar had admitted frustration at seeing offending so often a family affair, he said. Whole families appeared in the Children and Young Persons Court and pro-

gressed through the system to the District Court. Sir David said the family unit could be likened to the atom of a whole society, and the family members to an atom’s neutrons and protons. Stable atoms made up a stable society, but when one or more of the neutrons or protons ran wild or out of control, the family also underwent change. When too many atoms of society experienced such an alteration, then that society as a whole begins to steer in new directions, adopt new attitudes and accept new principles, he said. Echoing the Mayor of Rotorua, Mr J. E. Keaney, that change was inevitable, the Attorney-General, Mr McLay, said that to a very marked degree the genius of common law was the way it had coped with many of the legal problems posed up by changes in society. Common law could not have survived had not great judges been prepared to lay new principles to cope with new problems as they emerged. Similarly legislators had had to grapple with new problems, Mr McLay said. In many respects the simple laws of negligence, causation, and foreseeability, still provided answers for new problems and new activities. “Torts involving rights of property and patent law still enable our courts to deal with many of the new forms of unlawful use of intellectual property,” Mr McLay said. Similarly statute law would quickly

lose its broad base of public acceptance. “In many respects legislative law reform is only a more rapid version of the process of change that we as lawyers are familiar with in respect of judgemade laws.” Mr McLay said the range of topics to be discussed during the conference confirmed that lawyers were now prepared to plunge themselves into diverse and difficult questions such as how to protect copyright owners from the attacks of video pirates, whether the criminal law was adequate to deal with thefts committed by access to computers programmed for electronic funds transfer, whether a genetically engineered new form of life could be patented, whether limits should be set on experiments with recombinate D.N.A. or what legal status should be attached to a child born as a result of in-vitro fertilisation to parents who had supplied neither sperm nor McLay said that in the past those problems would have been little more than scientific speculation. Today they were all realities that lawyers must face.