The Honourable Rex Mason Prize for Excellence in Legal Writing has been awarded to Oliver Hailes and Andrew Geddis.

New Zealand's oldest legal writing prize, the latest Honourable Rex Mason Prize was awarded for writing which was published in a New Zealand legal publication between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2016.

The winning article was "The Trans-Pacific Partnership in New Zealand's Constitution", which was published in the New Zealand Universities Law Review in December 2016.

Oliver Hailes is a judge's clerk at the Court of Appeal in Wellington and graduated in law and arts from the University of Otago. He was recently awarded a prestigious Woolf Fisher Scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England.

Andrew Geddis is a Professor of law at the University of Otago.

The prize was established in 1973 and commemorates Henry Greathead Rex Mason (1885-1975), one of New Zealand's longest-serving MPs, and a former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice. It is valued at around $1,000 each year and is managed by the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Law Society as trustee for the Honourable Rex Maxon Trust.

The prize judges are a nominee of the Chief Justice, the Dean of Victoria University of Wellington Law School, and the Editor of the New Zealand Law Journal.

A list of prize winners since 2010 is available here.