Auckland Crown Solicitor Simon Moore QC has been appointed a High Court Judge. Justice Moore graduated with an LLB from Auckland University in 1980 and was employed as a law clerk at Meredith Connell in Auckland, becoming a staff solicitor in 1982. In 1985 he became a partner of that firm, and has been chairman of partners since 2003. In June 1994 Justice Moore was appointed Crown Solicitor for Auckland. In March 2000 he was appointed Public Prosecutor for Pitcairn Island by the British Government, and in 2004 was responsible for the prosecution of 12 men on the Island for historical sexual offending. Justice Moore was appointed Senior Counsel in 2008, becoming Queen’s Counsel when the title was restored in 2012. The new Judge will sit in Auckland.
Two acting District Court Judges have been appointed for terms of two years. Auckland lawyer Kevin Glubbhas been appointed with general and jury warrants and will be based in Waitakere. He will be sworn in on 20 March 2014. Admitted in 1990, Mr Glubb is a partner with Auckland Crown Solicitors, Meredith Connell, where he has worked since 1999 and is currently on secondment as special counsel to the Serious Fraud Office. His experience is in the field of criminal law and prosecution. Mr Glubb served with the Police from 1975 to 1998, becoming a senior legal advisor in 1993. Auckland barrister Gary Harrison has been appointed with a general warrant and will be based in Auckland. He will be sworn in on 31 March. Mr Harrison was admitted in 1970 and has been a barrister sole since 1978. He has broad experience in all aspects of litigation but has practised nearly exclusively in civil and commercial litigation in recent years. Mr Harrison was appointed one of the counsel to assist the Royal Commissioner inquiring into the Mt Erebus disaster and was the Registrar of Private Investigators and Security Guards from 1996 to 2010.
Rex Maidment has been appointed the Legal Complaints Review Officer. He succeeds Hanneke Bouchier, who did not apply for reappointment when her term expired. Mr Maidment has been Principal Tenancy Adjudicator for the past six years. He was a barrister sole from 2000 to 2007 specialising in civil, employment, property, criminal, family and mental health law. His early experience was in general practice as a lawyer and litigation partner in a South Auckland law firm. Mr Maidment will be assisted by two Deputy Legal Complaints Review Officers, Owen Vaughan and Dorothy Thresher. The appointments, made under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006, are for terms of three years.
Otago University has appointed three new staff members to its Law Faculty. Dr Jesse Wall studied law and philosophy at Otago University from 2003 to 2007. On being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he moved to Oxford to study towards the Bachelor Civil Law and then onto the Doctorate of Philosophy in law. Since concluding his studies in 2012, he has been a law lecturer and junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford. Maria Hook has just completed a PhD at Victoria University, where she was also working as a research fellow. Before that, she was a judges’ clerk at the High Court at Wellington. She graduated with an LLB (Hons First Class) and a BCA in International Business from Victoria University in 2009. Simon Connell returned to Dunedin in 2010 after working for the Accident Compensation Corporation for around five years. He made the move to research an LLM by thesis and that led to a PhD.
Dr Jennifer Moore has been appointed acting director of the Legal Issues Centre at Otago University’s Law Faculty. Ms Moore is a lawyer, social scientist and health scientist, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Medicine. She has worked as a research fellow in the Otago Faculty of Law’s Centre for Law and Policy in Emerging Technologies. From 2007-2009, she was based at the Otago University Medical Faculty in Wellington, working as a lecturer in the Public Health Department. She was a lecturer in the Health Sciences Department, Faculty of Medicine, Monash University, Australia from 2003 to 2006. The Legal Issues Centre is an empirical legal research centre and an intellectual meeting ground for interdisciplinary researchers, legal practitioners, policy makers and educators interested in advancing knowledge about the impact of law, legal processes and services.