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Magna Carta and New Zealand pp 229–251Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Mana and Magna Carta: Locating New Legacies for a Medieval Charter in Post-colonial Aotearoa New Zealand

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Abstract

Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant modern constitutional dilemma concerns the relationship between Māori and the Crown. While recognizing that Magna Carta offers no direct solutions to the issues posed by differing interpretations of Aotearoa’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, this chapter proposes that the 1215 Charter offers new ways of exploring the Crown-Māori relationship within existing constitutional structures. It challenges the traditional narrative of Magna Carta, which focuses exclusively on the relationship between government and the governed. Instead, it employs the original Charter’s approach to Welsh grievances to recast one of New Zealand’s founding constitutional documents as a model for legal pluralism and argues this offers a useful counterpoint to the nineteenth-century conceptions of sovereignty that continue to dominate modern debate.

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Acknowledgements

Elements of this chapter were presented as part of the University of Auckland Magna Carta Lecture Series, July 2015, the 2015 Canterbury History Foundation Jim Gardner Memorial Lecture (the transcript of which was published for members under the title “Magna Carta—800 Years & Beyond”), and the University of Sydney workshop “Medieval Legacies of Human Rights in Australasia, Europe, and Muslim Societies,” June 2016. I am grateful to the participants at all three for their comments, and for the good advice of my co-editor, Stephen Winter.

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  1. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Chris Jones

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  1. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stephen Winter

  2. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Chris Jones

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Jones, C. (2017). Mana and Magna Carta: Locating New Legacies for a Medieval Charter in Post-colonial Aotearoa New Zealand. In: Winter, S., Jones, C. (eds) Magna Carta and New Zealand. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58439-3_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58439-3_12

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58439-3

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