On 12 November 2024, the University of Auckland published a proposal to merge the Faculties of Law and of Business and Economics into one Faculty. The proposal includes a division of the Law School into two departments, one focused on private law (including commercial law) and the other on public law.
The justification for this radical proposal is stated as follows:
“By combining the Faculties of Law and Business & Economics, the aim of the proposal is to create a comprehensive faculty that brings together distinct and complementary disciplinary strength.
This proposed combined faculty structure would foster greater collaboration across a wide range of legal and business disciplines. It would provide economies of scale that enhance resources and support for research, particularly benefiting academic staff and students through increased access to donor-funded research centres and specialised support that have not been available in Law.
Currently, the Faculty of Law’s smaller scale limits its ability to fully leverage its strengths. The proposed alignment with Business & Economics allows both faculties to address this and to create a new faculty that positions the University as the national leader in business and law. This proposed new arrangement would reinforce Auckland’s role as New Zealand’s commercial and legal hub, better positioning the University to support the needs of the business and legal communities. This combined faculty would act as a gateway, where business leaders gain direct access to legal expertise and legal professionals draw on a range of commercial, corporate, and related expertise. It also would strengthen Auckland’s standing as a centre of innovation and interdisciplinary knowledge, benefiting our students, staff, and society at large.”
The proposal has been met with almost universal opposition from the Law School staff and from law graduates. The Faculty makes much of the reputational damage that will be done to the Law School if it is seen as being just a part of Business Studies. It is said that academics and students need to be able to identify to an independent Law School that is not connected to any specific discipline such as business studies: “Many of our students come to study law because of an interest in protecting their communities from both private and public power, through the study of fields such as human rights, social justice, and Indigenous law.” There is a particular risk, it is said, that these students may go elsewhere if they perceive Auckland to be commercially driven.
The Law Faculty, in its submission, draws support for its position from a High Court Judgment delivered by Justice Hammond (who had been a former Dean of the Auckland Law School) which upheld a challenge to a similar proposal in 2002 in the University of Waikato. He said:
“The question of where something is taught is no ‘mere’ or ‘incidental’ matter. It is a matter of the greatest academic significance. The structure of courses, how they are taught, what the purpose of the courses is perceived to be, how well they will be supported, and so on, turns on a fundamental appreciation of the general philosophy and direction of an academic entity.” [Association of University Staff of New Zealand Inc. v. University of Waikato [2002] NZAR 817, para. 81]
It is significant that the two experiments in amalgamating law and business schools – in the Universities of Western Australia and Canterbury - have been failures and demerged.
A second part of the Proposal is to divide the Law School into two separate departments – private law and public law. The Faculty in its submission opposing this proposal says, correctly: “Our expertise in the study of courts and legal institutions, the study of legal reasoning, argumentation, dispute resolution, legal research, and pedagogy, do not fit under either category. The distinction also ignores the considerable influence that each has on the other, a topic that I have recently written on: “The Interaction of Public and Private Law”
(2023) 30 NZULR 359.
I endorse the Faculty’s opposition to the Proposal in all its aspects and am unconvinced that there is any merit in it. Adding another level of administration – there are to be Deans of each of the Law and Business Schools with an overall supervisory Dean - without any tangible benefit makes no sense to me. And, while there are certainly areas of the law that have a link to economics and business (notably Commercial Law and Competition Law), there are other areas of the law that link to other disciplines that have no connection to business and economics – for example Jurisprudence and Philosophy, Family law and Sociology, Criminal law and Criminology.
It is to be hoped that the University of Auckland abandons this unmeritorious proposal which will do harm and no good.
James Farmer
21 January 2025