Paul Gerrard McHugh (born 1958) is a New Zealand academic lawyer. He teaches at the University of Cambridge where he is a Professor in Law and Legal History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College.
Education
McHugh was born Gisborne, New Zealand. He graduated LL.B.(Hons I) from Victoria University of Wellington, LLM (Saskatchewan), and obtained his PhD at Cambridge with his dissertation "The aboriginal rights of the New Zealand Maori at common law" (which was awarded a Yorke Prize in 1988). It will be republished by Institute of Post-Treaty Settlements Office as a classic influential text.
Career
McHugh's work has primarily been in the field of common-law aboriginal rights, a topic on which he has published extensively. He is recognised as an authority on the legal status of tribal peoples in North America and Australasia; as both a doctrinal scholar and as a legal historian, as well as writer on the 'politics of historiography.'
His work on the doctrine of aboriginal title in New Zealand argued that there remained unextinguished Māori rights around the coastline. The High Court accepted and cited his work in the Te Weehi case (1986), leading to a series of cases in which New Zealand courts applied Māori customary law, recognising it as the basis for Māori rights and exemption from the regulatory regime of the Fisheries Act 1988. His early academic reputation rests upon his pioneering work on the status of the common law doctrine of aboriginal title, a field to which he returned after the Ngati Apa case (2003) reactivated this debate in New Zealand. The Court's judgments led to the foreshore and seabed controversy (2003-4) which fundamentally changed the course of New Zealand politics and ruptured the Maori Rātana movement's longstanding alliance with the Labour Party. McHugh is recognised as a leading authority on common law aboriginal title and the legal character of tribal peoples' property rights throughout the common law world. It is believed the New Zealand Government's willingness to settle the Maori commercial sea fisheries claim (1992) was directly attributable to McHugh's work and, associated with it, high-placed anxiety about an 'activist' New Zealand Court of Appeal. The President Robin Cooke, Baron Cooke of Thorndon, as he became (1995) was known to hold a personal copy of McHugh's dissertation and in conversation with him as well as having shown judicial mettle in the Maori Council cases of the time. Though based upon the claim to present unextinguished rights (rather than those lost by colourable Crown conduct in the past) this was the country's first multimillion-dollar settlement of Maori claims in the modern era, and a foretaste of the claims settlement processes and asset transfers that followed and as contemplated by the Maori Council cases. McHugh is associated with the view that common law aboriginal title was primarily a legal argument devised (in western Canada initially) during the early 1970s and following decade to deal with the inaction of the political branches (their incapacity to legislate comprehensive land rights/claims regimes). McHugh was amongst a small group of lawyer/scholars during the 1980s (Brian Slattery, Kent McNeil, Henry Reynolds, Barbara Hocking, Richard Bartlett, Tom Berger) to package aboriginal title in a manner that became palatable to courts. He has been especially associated with its New Zealand dimension, as Justice Willamson acknowledged in Te Weehi and as his influence both upon the activation and course of the foreshore and seabed controversy showed. He made considerable public lectures and practitioners workshops in New Zealand during this period, and his work was regarded as influential at the highest political levels (including a half-day presentation to the Parliamentary Select Committee and Waitangi Tribunal). As the controversy waged (particularly during the lifetime of the Clark premiership and the Fifth Labour Government of New Zealand redrawing the country's political map), his published work returned to the more doctrinal orientation it had taken during his early career before his so-called 'Pocockian turn' described in Mark Hickford's important book Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011) at 221-3 and Bernard Cadogan 'Treaty and Method' (online at this link).
McHugh published The Māori Magna Carta (1991), which for the first time explained and analysed the range of laws specifically affecting the Māori in light of the Treaty of Waitangi.