He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms—Māmari Stephens and Mary Boyce (Eds) (2013)
This dictionary captures something of the unique intersection between Māori and Pākehā legal thinking and expression. The publication draws its entries and usage examples from the Legal Māori Corpus, a digitised collection of thousands of pages of legal and law-related texts in the Māori language dating from 1828 to 2009.
Publication details
Stephens, M. and M. Boyce (Eds) He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms. Wellington: LexisNexis NZ, 2013
About the book
He Papakupu Reo Ture edited by Mamari Stephens (Te Rarawa) and Mary Boyce, is the first and only dictionary of Māori legal terms in New Zealand. Since 2008 Stephens has been leading the “Legal Māori Project” investigating the use of the Māori language throughout New Zealand legal history to express Western legal concepts. After producing a corpus of Māori language texts, a digital archive, He Papakupu Reo Ture was published in 2013.
New Zealand’s legal history is bilingual. From the earliest missionary-led translations of the New Testament in the early nineteenth century, the Māori language has been used to communicate Western legal ideas. Nearly two centuries later there now exists a significant legal vocabulary in Māori that has much to teach scholars of law and language in New Zealand about the intersection between Māori and Pākehā legal thinking and expression.
He Papakupu Reo Ture has an easy layout of terms with reference notes and contextual examples of how the term has been used in legal contexts. All of the Legal Māori Project’s outputs and resources are now a publicly available resource. http://www.legalMāori.net/
Further information
This publication is part of the series Te Takarangi: Celebrating Māori publications - a sample list of 150 non-fiction books produced by a partnership between Royal Society Te Apārangi and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga.