Open AccessRobin Cooke, Human Rights and the Pacific Dimension
Author(s) -
Michael Kirby
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
victoria university of wellington law review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1179-3082
pISSN - 1171-042X
DOI - 10.26686/vuwlr.v39i1.5456
Subject(s) - human rights , jurisprudence , project commissioning , orthodoxy , publishing , ideal (ethics) , law , dimension (graph theory) , sociology , law and economics , political science , philosophy , theology , mathematics , pure mathematics
Lord Cooke's life as lawyer and judge was astonishing in its achievements. The author traces his counter-cultural embrace of notions of human rights both in case decisions and in scholarly articles. He describes Lord Cooke's approach to judging – a mixture of orthodoxy and radical new ideas. He describes his contribution to the emergence of a distinctive New Zealand jurisprudence, curiously asserted in advance of the termination of Privy Council appeals and before similar "liberation" in Australia. The author concludes with a reminder of Lord Cooke's prediction of a "common law of the world". He suggests that building an effective regional human rights mechanism for the Pacific would be a timely and practical contribution to that ideal.