Legislation: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary

This article considers the question of the delegation of lawmaking. The increasing use of tertiary legislation in New Zealand is analysed. It is suggested that the use of tertiary legislation is concerning in some aspects including the potential for abuses of power, inaccessibility, complexity and inconsistency

The Changing Approach to the Interpretation of Statutes

This article was a paper presented at a conference celebrating the career of Sir Ivor Richardson. The author discusses the trends in statutory interpretation in New Zealand. The article notes that early statutory interpretation was literal. However, the introduction of section 5(1) of the Interpretation Act 1999 called for a purposive approach to statutory interpretation, resulting in judges like Sir Ivor Richardson advocating for contextual materials to be presented to the court. The author argues that the purposive approach is preferable, as the judiciary is said to have the freedom to consider contextual materials but is not bound to apply them blindly. However, Professor Burrows notes that the dominant purposive approach is qualified by the existence of fundamental democratic values and clear statutory wording by Parliament. The article concludes that there is now an increasing recognition that the intention of Parliament alone is insufficient in an exercise of statutory interpretation.&nbsp

Common Law among the Statutes: The Lord Cooke Lecture 2007

This article is based on the 6th Lord Cooke Lecture, delivered in the Law School of the Victoria University of Wellington on 5 December 2007. The author discusses the relationship between common law and statute, a topic in which Lord Cooke had a real interest and on which he and the author discussed in person.&nbsp

Congruences in racks and quandles : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics at Massey University, Manawatū Campus, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Racks and quandles are related algebraic structures based on axioms of invertibility and self-distributivity, and in the case of quandles, an additional idempotence axiom — thus every quandle is a rack. They have practical application as the three quandle axioms algebraically encode the Reidemeister moves of knot theory. However, racks and quandles are interesting and worthy of study in their own right and that is what we do here. Congruences are a means of distilling patterns of behaviour within algebraic structures. They allow us to form a quotient that gives us a coarser view of the structure from which we can discern interesting properties. Congruences need to respect the operations in the algebraic structure. Racks, although often defined in terms of only one binary operation, necessarily, as a result of the invertibility axiom, have two binary operations — a primary rack operation and an inverse rack operation. We have a rack in the quotient only when the congruence respects both operations. A congruence that respects both operations we call a rack congruence or a quandle congruence. Congruences defined in terms of only one of the binary operations may not preserve the rack structure in the quotient. This raises the question of whether congruences that respect only one rack operation — half congruences — can exist. We show they can by constructing examples of half congruences that do not induce a rack in the quotient. For weighted average quandles on Q we completely characterise congruences in terms of certain subgroups of Q. Depending on the weight, congruences can exhibit one of three possible behaviours. Weighted average quandles are a special case of the more general Alexander quandle. For Alexander quandles, we characterise when a congruence induces an Alexander quandle in the quotient. In weighted average quandles every congruence comes from a subgroup of Q. In Alexander quandles, there are additional congruences that do not come from a subgroup. We give examples of congruences that exhibit that more complex behaviour

Preliminary study of an optimum vibration absorber for a multi-mass system with multiple excitation

The object of this thesis is to demonstrate, by the use of a modern digital computer, a fast, efficient method to eliminate or minimize undesirable stress conditions in a multimass vibrating system with multiple excitation. The condition desired is obtained by the addition of an optimum tuned and damped dynamic vibration absorber, for one critical speed only. Maximum stress is the criteria used for design here and not amplitude as has been used previously by all other authors. This solution requires the applied torque to be reevaluated as an average torque and a number of half integer harmonics. This method also demonstrates the use of a Holzer Table with complex numbers to account for damping --Abstract, page ii