Editor

Obituary for Professor Michael Taggart

Members of the Faculty of Law at the University of Auckland have received news of the death of their esteemed colleague, Professor Mike Taggart, with great sorrow. Mike Taggart was known throughout the common law world as one of a handful of great administrative lawyers. At his retirement last year, the Chief Justice described him as 'the most influential legal academic of his generation'. His retirement earlier this year, after 26 years on the Faculty, was forced by ill health.

On leaving Mount Albert Grammar School Mike studied for an LLB(Hons) which he completed in 1977, as Senior Scholar in Law. After two years as a Judge's Clerk in Auckland, he went to Harvard Law School on a Fulbright, graduating LLM in 1980. His first teaching job was at the University of Western Ontario, and he returned to Auckland in 1982 to a lectureship in administrative, constitutional and contract law. Five years later he was appointed a professor at the age of 32, the youngest law professor in New Zealand's history. In 2004 he was honoured by the conferral of the Sir Alexander Turner Chair in Law. During his career Professor Taggart had several distinguished visiting fellowships and professorships, and delivered invited lectures at leading universities in other common law jurisdictions. In February a book of essays on public law, A Simple Common Lawyer, was launched in his honour. Senior legal academics and judges from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, England, Scotland and the United States contributed. These explored Professor Taggart's scholarly interests in administrative and public law, the public/private law divide, and legal history. The Faculty of Law was has been enriched by Professor Mike Taggart's contribution as scholar and friend over 26 years. He will be enormously missed by staff and students alike.

Compilers

Roslyn Smith has a law degree and a postgraduate diploma in librarianship. She worked for seventeen years at the University of Auckland Davis Law Library as a reference librarian and cataloguer and is presently a cataloguer in the General Library at the University. She drew up the list of subject headings used in the project and was responsible for much of the indexing of common law Festschriften and inputting of entries.

Bernice Cole has recently retired from the University of Auckland's Davis Law Library after 14 years service. She worked in a number of positions during this time, latterly as a Subject Librarian. She was responsible for inputting of English language contributions to foreign language Festschriften and some of the indexing of common law Festschriften.