Friday, August 14, 2015

Sir Geoffrey Palmer on NZ's ACC

Perhaps because one of my first sights upon disembarking in Auckland was someone in a Georgetown tee shirt, I was not immediately struck by the differences between New Zealand and the United States when I arrived in Aotearoa for a Fulbright in 1996.  But my education in comparative legal history certainly began when my family checked into our first motel, and I spotted a trampoline, more or less like the one pictured here, standing nonchalantly out back.  As my mind reeled from the tort liability, I suddenly knew that I was not in Kansas anymore.

Now comes an SSRN posting by Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC, Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law, of Big Change, Exciting Adventures: Accident Compensation, a chapter from his Reform: A Memoir (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2013), 198-226:
It concerns New Zealand’s novel accident compensation scheme that replaces tort law as a means of compensating the victims of accidents. It reviews the author’s involvement with the reform from its earliest days up until the present. It traces the difficulties with enacting the scheme, its administration and its financing. It also reviews efforts to take the reform to Australia where it was not enacted. It reflects upon the difficulties of securing general deterrence through the allocation of accident costs.