Book Review: The Constitution of Independence

This article is a book review of Peter C Oliver The Constitution of Independence: The Development of Constitutional Theory in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005) (367 + xx pages). The book is a contribution to the area of domestic constitutional law of the Commonwealth. Oliver addresses the question: are the former colonies of Britain ever truly independent, or is that independence illusory? He also asks how such colonies seek to understand and explain their constitutional history. Morris argues that the book had a great deal of potential but has been left unrealised. As a legal historiography, the book does not always satisfactorily explain how people involved in creating that legal history (or in analysing it since) understand it. As an exercise in constitutional theory, the book merely suggests that there is nothing much to choose between theories as a matter of logic. The book also suffers from very dense prose and a number of distracting metaphors for the process of constitutional independence. Morris ultimately concludes that the book fails to provide useful insight into New Zealand's constitutional theory.