MostlyLegal
100 Years of Law Practice West of Auckland
A hundred years of disputes, deeds and difficult clients, from the Waitākere ranges to the Whau. How law was actually practised at the western edge of a growing city — and who practised it.
A century of disputes, deeds
and difficult clients.
The first solicitor to open west of Auckland worked off a metalled road with the bush at his back, and built a practice one handshake at a time. A century on, the same streets carry a city. The files have changed with it: land transfers and timber leases have given way to matters nobody then could have anticipated.
Mostly Legal follows that hundred years through the firms, the courthouses and the people who filled them. It is a history of a profession told from the inside and close to the ground — the boundary dispute that outlasted both parties, the will three generations fought over, the young lawyer driving out to Helensville after dark because there was nobody else to call.
Drawn from firm archives, court records and the memories of those who were there, it is by turns exact, wry and unexpectedly moving: an account of how the ordinary business of law shaped a corner of New Zealand, and of the profession that grew up alongside it.
Draft excerpt — replace before launchThe file had been open eleven years when it reached my desk, and it came with a note from the retiring partner that read, in full: “Good luck.” Two neighbours, one fence, and a four-foot strip of land that neither of them had the slightest use for. I read it twice and understood that the land had never been the point.
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- Format
- Hardcover, Smyth sewn
- Extent
- TK pages
- Size
- TK × TK mm
- Illustrations
- TK black & white plates
- Published
- TK
- ISBN
- TK