Alison Quentin-Baxter and Janet McLean, This Realm of New Zealand

The Commonwealth of Nations is a voluntary association of 53 sovereign independent states almost all of which were once members of an indivisible Empire under the British Crown. Most members of the Commonwealth are constituted as republics, but there remain 16 Realms with Queen Elizabeth II as the Sovereign head of state. Though having the same historical origins, these constitutional monarchies have developed a diversity of constitutional arrangements and conventions. This is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in Anne Twomey’s recent monograph The Veiled Sceptre: Reserve Powers of Heads of State in Westminster Systems published by Cambridge University Press in April 2018. To further counteract any assumption that Commonwealth constitutional monarchies are of a piece with their Westminster origins, readers of this journal may be interested in the focus on just one of those realms in the book under review. Dame Alison Quentin-Baxter and Janet McLean bring to their writing unequalled expertise in the theory and the practice of constitutional governance in the Realm of New Zealand. Dame Alison has been a constitutional adviser in New Zealand and several small state jurisdictions, Director of the Law Commission and expert adviser on the issue of the Governor-General’s Letters Patent 1983. Janet McLean is an eminent professor of public law and governance who has held academic appointments in New Zealand and Scotland. Their focus is on an accurate description of the powers exercised by or on behalf of the Crown in New Zealand and on the conventions that circumscribe the exercise of those powers in a modern democratic society. A description of evolving norms, from the outset of British colonial rule in 1840 to the present, is an element of the authors’ crisp analysis of the main features of the nation’s constitutional structures. The historical elements of the book’s chapters are the subject of this review.

Commonwealth · Constitutional law · Constitutional theory · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sociology · Sovereign state · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · Commonwealth, Australian Politics and Federalism · Law · Military and Defense Studies · Political Systems and Governance