Law is a technology of coordination. It structures obligation, authority, remedy and exchange. Long before statutes consolidated power, plural legal orders – customary, mercantile, communal – governed collective life through layered systems of recognition.
My work in law examines legitimacy at its foundation: how capacity is recognised, how authority is delegated, and how private and public orders interact. It engages common law and indigenous lore traditions, future-ancient commercial instruments, regulatory systems and emerging digital governance models. My work examines how lawful structure operates in a world where governance increasingly intersects with decentralised networks, AI systems and transnational communities.
Admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand, with training in sociology and anthropology, I approach law not as static doctrine but as living infrastructure. I work on governance design, regulatory-technical alignment and plural legal frameworks that recognise the distinction between natural persons, legal instruments and emerging digital agents. My lawful consultancy and research extends beyond the legal jurisdiction, to plurality, private ordering, and trust and legitimacy frameworks.
My focus also includes identity and standing in digital environments, delegation and accountability semantics, trust and agency structures, and the lawful architecture underpinning decentralised autonomous organisations. Rather than treating blockchain as regulatory evasion, I treat it as an opportunity to clarify capacity, consent and responsibility across jurisdictions. This work has informed practical governance design, including the development of decentralised human rights coordination models and role-based delegation frameworks tested within live civic and protocol-native contexts.
Foundations
I am particularly interested in how common law principles, merchant law traditions and indigenous legal worldviews can inform contemporary digital governance. As machine-mediated systems participate in economic and civic life, the question is no longer whether law applies, but how authority is recognised and bounded within hybrid human–synthetic systems.
My work with NGOs, governance initiatives and decentralised projects centres on ensuring that technological experimentation does not outrun lawful coherence. Legitimacy must remain legible. Accountability must remain traceable.
Law, culture and technology are not separate domains. They are overlapping coordination systems. My practice works at their intersection – designing structures capable of durability, plurality and ethical adaptation in a rapidly shifting institutional landscape.
The question beneath it all remains constant:
“On what grounds does a person bind themselves, or others, in law?”
Some Key Projects below:
Featured
SILT is a long-term research and infrastructure project concerned with a deceptively simple question:
How is a person recognised as capable of acting, consenting, and binding themselves or others in law?
Modern identity systems rarely ask this directly. They assume legitimacy has already been settled somewhere else.
SILT moves upstream.