Talk:Comparative law and justice/New Zealand

Mid-Semester Comments:

You are off to a good start here--but there will be a lot of revisions needed before the final version is due in order to make sure your page is complete and well-done. As I am sure you are aware, a lot of your content has been entered in a kind of rough draft format. That's fine for now, but it will matter in the end. Remember that you are writing for public consumption, so you want it to look good. The Wikipedia Manual of Style might be useful to you in this endeavor. Do be sure to start with some sort of introductory paragraph about what New Zealand is as a country. Your references are starting to get in shape, but you'll want to work a bit more on them as well. Finally, while images are not required, you might want to add at least a picture of the flag and a map to show where New Zealand is--the Images page can help with that.

Your content in the Basic Info section is generally good--though you might want to expand the History section a bit specifically to discuss the role of the British Commonwealth and New Zealand's move towards at least some independence. Similarly, you should explain a bit more what the role of the Queen is in current NZ government.

Your discussion of judicial review needs to focus on whether the judiciary in NZ has the authority to engage in judicial review. You're right that NZ is a common law country, but you need to move that to the history or governance section; the Family Law heading is for content to be discussed and written later in the semester (adoption, marriage, divorce, that sort of thing).

In noting that NZ has a lower crime rate, you need to be a bit more explicit about what the source of your comparison is--low compared to whom, exactly?

In general--you are doing very well. You want to ensure that you do go back after we've talked about issues and check over your work to see that it is consistent with the ideas and concepts we've discussed in class. In addition, while the bullet lists are 100% fine for now, you will want the final version to be written in a way that is easy to read and useful for readers and that flows well. So when you have time, do start working on turning your lists into prose in most cases.

Mlarthur 02:13, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Sensible Sentencing Trust
Some of the factual content is sourced from the Sensible Sentencing Trust. Please note that the Sensible Sentencing Trust is a political lobby group and not a reliable source of impartial facts and statistics. Stuartyeates 22:20, 16 November 2011 (UTC)