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45th Annual Conference of the
Australian and New Zealand
Law and History Society

Dates: Thursday 3 – Saturday 5 December 2026

Location: The University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Conference theme:

‘Oral sources and Non-traditional legal sources’

Legal historians have traditionally looked to cases, statutes, and juristic literature. Yet the history of law has never been confined to such conventional legal sources. The use of oral sources and non-traditional materials raise important methodological questions for legal historians: what counts as a legal source? and how might law and history be written differently?

The 2026 conference theme invites consideration of oral sources and non-traditional legal sources, in every sense, in the context of law and history. Some conference streams will focus specifically on oral sources, including oral testimony, oral history, memory, storytelling, folklore, and intergenerational transmission. The theme invites participants to reconsider the sources of law and history.

Oral sources are especially important for histories of Indigenous law. We invite papers on tikanga Māori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander customary law, and practices grounded in kinship, place, obligation, authority, and procedure. Such work may examine how colonial legal systems have misunderstood, appropriated, suppressed, or transformed Indigenous legal knowledge.

The conference also invites engagement with non-traditional legal sources more broadly, including newspapers, petitions, letters, council decisions, archival records, folklore, family histories, demographic material, and socio-economic data. Newspapers, for example, were forums in which trials were reported, in which the reputations of parties could be sensationalised, and by which communities could engage with the law. In essence, newspapers and other non-traditional sources can illuminate how law was experienced in everyday life.

This conference invites participants to explore oral and non-traditional legal sources. Themes may include: the challenges of using oral and non-traditional sources; customary law; the relationship between memory and the law; and the role of non-traditional sources to explore law and society.

Papers are welcome from all periods, jurisdictions, disciplines, and methodological approaches. We also welcome papers that are outside of the conference theme.

This conference is a co-hosted event supported by Monash University and the University of Canterbury.

Keynote announcements

‘”Many characters in search of an author”: Judicial biography in New Zealand’

Jeremy Finn

Professor Emeritus,

University of Canterbury

New Zealand has had a formal structure of courts and judges for 185 years.   In that time those courts have had  several hundred judges at varying court levels.  Yet even counting some works which look at more than one judge the number of published biographies of individual New Zealand judges is under 20.  Not all of these qualify as “judicial biographies” containing a substantial discussion of the subject’s judicial role.  This paper considers the nature – and timing – of what has been published to date before exploring reasons why the field has been so neglected  in New Zealand. It canvasses some prime candidates for biographical study  and pleads for scholars to encourage judicial biography as a field  for research.

The organising committee is thrilled to announce two further keynote speakers:  Professor Te Maire Tau (University of Canterbury) and Distinguished Professor Shaunnagh Dorsett (University of Technology Sydney). 

Professor Tau (Ūpoko of Ngāi Tūāhuriri, a hapu of Ngāi Tahu) is a historian on oral traditions, tribal genealogies, and indigenous knowledge systems. Professor Tau became the first Director of the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre at the University of Canterbury in 2011. The centre was founded to facilitate Ngāi Tahu’s intellectual capital, leadership, and iwi development. Across the diverse worlds of academia, governance and the “flax roots” of his Tuahiwi village community, his strength lies in collaborating and building relationships across generations and cultures. His historical knowledge proved invaluable during the settlement of Ngāi Tahu’s Treaty of Waitangi claims, providing evidence in the Waitangi Tribunal, and also playing a part in the Treaty settlement negotiations. Subsequently, his scholarly pursuits extended to writing various publications on oral traditions and the relationship between indigenous knowledge systems and how they intersect with western science and economics. With his leadership, profound expertise and commitment to cultural and economic enrichment, Professor Tau greatly influences discussions on indigenous heritage and its connection to modern viewpoints.

Professor Dorsett‘s research focuses on questions of authority, reaching across legal history, jurisprudence and contemporary indigenous rights to land. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on legal doctrine, legal history and history of political thought in order to shed light on some of the key concepts of law: authority; jurisdiction; and sovereignty. Her work has been influential in a number of areas of legal scholarship, including jurisprudence, international law and legal history. Professor Dorsett is an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History; a member of the Advisory Board of the European Society for Comparative Legal History; a co-founder of the Legal Histories of Empires conference series; and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.  She is also the editor of a number of influential legal history collections, including Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (Palgrave McMillen) (edited with Ian Hunter); Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies (Routledge) (edited with John McLaren); and Legal Histories of Empire: Navigating Legalities (Routledge) (edited with Lyndsay Campbell). Professor Dorsett is former President of ANZLHS.

Call for Paper Guidelines

On behalf of ANZLHS, the Conference Organising Committee cordially invites papers from any period or geographical area, and from all disciplines and fields, including but not limited to law, legal theory, history, political science, indigenous studies, gender studies and law and literature.

Papers are invited on any topic, but the conference organisers particularly welcome abstracts addressing the conference theme of ‘Oral Sources and Non-Traditional Legal Sources’.

Please note presenters must be members of ANZLHS before their papers are presented. You can join or renew here: https://anzlhs.org/join-us/.

An Early Career Researcher (ECR) session will be held on Thursday 3 December 2026. Details will follow.

If you are an ECR, please indicate your interest in attending the session when submitting your abstract. Graduate students may apply for Kercher Scholarships to support their attendance at the conference. Please contact the Organising Committee at anzlhs2026@gmail.com by Monday 6 July 2026 to express interest in this scholarship. Graduate students and other ECRs may also wish to enter for the Forbes Society Prize (see https://anzlhs.org/francis-forbes-society-for-australian-legal-history-annual-prize/). Please notify the conference conveners of your intention to apply for the scholarship at the time of submitting your abstract.

The Society’s peer-reviewed journal law&history (see https://anzlhs.org/journal/) will consider submissions from those who present papers at the conference.

Registration details and accommodation options in Christchurch will follow.

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and should be accompanied by a short biography (100 words). Panel submissions are also warmly encouraged. Submissions should be sent to anzlhs2026@gmail.com.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts by Monday 20 July 2026. Acceptances will be communicated by 17 August 2026.