Law is a technology of coordination. It structures obligation, authority, remedy and exchange. Long before modern states consolidated legal power, plural orders, Indigenous and customary law, merchant practice, communal governance and private ordering, organised collective life through different systems of relationship, recognition and obligation.
My work in law examines legitimacy at the point where different orders meet: how standing is recognised, where authority comes from, how obligations arise, and what allows people, communities and institutions to rely upon one another across legal, cultural and technological boundaries.
Admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand, with training in sociology and anthropology, I approach law not simply as doctrine but as living infrastructure. My work moves across public and private law, Indigenous and customary orders, trust and agency, commercial instruments, governance and emerging forms of digital coordination.
I am particularly interested in plurality and private ordering: the ways lawful relationships can arise through contract, mandate, trust, custom, collective recognition and institutional authority, while remaining alert to the very different questions of enforceability, jurisdiction and recognition that arise when those relationships encounter state systems.
Increasingly this work extends into digital environments, where old legal questions are returning in new forms. An institution delegates authority to an officer. A trustee acts for beneficiaries. A community recognises someone as able to speak or act. An AI agent executes an instruction. In each case, technical capability alone does not tell us whether the act carries legitimate authority.
Foundations
Law has never existed as a single universal grammar.
Different peoples and institutions have developed different ways of determining standing, authority, obligation, remedy and exchange. These orders have collided, overlapped, borrowed from one another and, frequently, been subordinated through colonisation and state consolidation.
My research asks what can be learned from those longer histories without romanticising them. Common law, Indigenous jurisprudence, customary orders, merchant practice, trusts, agency and negotiable instruments all contain ways of organising relationships that remain instructive as coordination becomes increasingly digital and transnational.
The question for emerging systems is therefore not simply whether existing law applies. It is also what happens when actors carrying authority from different sources meet, and what must become legible for an encounter to proceed without requiring one order to disappear into another?
My work with civil society organisations, communities, governance initiatives and technology projects asks how experimentation can proceed without outrunning legitimacy. Authority should be intelligible. Consent should carry meaning. Delegation should have boundaries. Accountability should survive changes in institution or technology.
Law, culture and technology are not separate domains. They are overlapping systems through which people create meaning, coordinate action and structure relationships. My practice works at their intersections, looking for forms capable of carrying plurality, responsibility and change without demanding false uniformity.
The question beneath it all remains:
“What makes an act binding, for whom, and by whose authority?”
Some Key Projects below:
Featured
Plural authority and the architecture of encounter.
SILT is a long-term research, standards and implementation project exploring how different legal, cultural, customary, private and institutional orders can become mutually legible when they meet, without requiring them to collapse into a single system or surrender their own sources of authority.