Abstract
Aotearoa/New Zealand is a legally pluralist society. We are currently being inundated with discussion around how tikanga Māori and Aotearoa/New Zealand state law relate to one another, with the Ellis case, the recognitions of places as legal persons, and the recent Law Commission report He Poutama, as some examples which have all been covered extensively by legal scholars and journalists alike. In the course of his work on He Poutama, Justice Whata has dubbed it "a Cambrian explosion".
However, the orthodox position maintained by the state is that Aotearoa/New Zealand is a monolegal society, with state legislation at the apex. As a result, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s constitutional foundations are uncertain at best, incoherent or illegitimate at worst. The starting point for this dissertation is that we ought to try and strengthen these foundations, to create greater constitutional legitimacy.