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Mijatov, Tiho --- "Editorial" [2013] NZLawStuJl 2; (2013) 3 NZLSJ iii

Last Updated: 29 May 2014

EDITORIAL

TIHO MIJATOV

LLB(HONS) STUDENT, UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

As the present issue marches the New Zealand Law Students’ Journal into its third volume I cannot help but feel proud of the shape the “NZLSJ” is taking. Our national student law journal is becoming an institution.

It certainly maintains its status as a New Zealand law journal. The members of the Chief Editorial Board, each of whom I thank for their proficient and passionate efforts over the past months, hail from law faculties all around New Zealand. The articles submitted for consideration came from nearly every law campus in the country. The six articles eventually published in this issue should make their law schools proud.

The range of topics covered by the articles reinforces this as a law journal, but it also reminds us just how broad “law” can be. Between them the six articles canvass and question law’s interaction with living wills, refusal of emergency treatment, children’s mental health, privacy, geoengineering, and competition in the marketplace. Instead of shying away from gnarly social issues, each article does the legal community a service by focusing on them in a coherent and crisp way.

Such confidence may well be the great benefit of ours being a student law journal. These articles provide readers with glimpses at what some of the best law students – future lawyers, academics, judges, politicians, activists and others – have been committing their brainpower to. In my own reading of the articles, I was struck by many authors’ concerns

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about vulnerable groups in our society – children, the old, the sick and even the unconscious. Not a few of the authors called for legislative change to get justice through greater certainty. Some were unashamedly practical, looking forward to a better legal system. Another burrowed down into the past to critique accepted truths. If research and writing can be a window into the intellectual, moral, and cultural makeup of those behind it, this issue should assure the legal community that the law is passing into competent and careful hands.

Tiho Mijatov

Editor, 2013