Early on in this project I was having lunch with Mike Taggart. We were
talking about John Austin’s legal theory. Mike stopped me short asking:
‘But what impact did his theory have on the real life of the law?’ ‘That,’
he added, ‘is the question Brian Simpson would ask.’ Neither Brian, who
was my teacher, nor Mike, who was my colleague and friend, have lived
to see completed this attempt to assess the impact of political and legal
theory on common law conceptions of statehood. Had they done so,
they would each, no doubt, have pointed out the many cases, counterexamples
and discussions I have missed out and should have included,
and the misconceptions that have remained. I miss their contributions
greatly and no doubt the work is worse for that. I thank them nevertheless
for the many ways in which they have each influenced this project.
I owe thanks to numerous other people and institutions. For invitations
to present early versions of the work, my thanks go to audiences at
the Law Schools at the universities of Auckland, Dundee, Edinburgh,
Glasgow, London, Victoria University of Wellington and Yale, to Oxford
University’s Constitutional Theory Seminar and to the seminar at the
Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University. I also thank the
New Zealand Crown Law Office for the opportunity to discuss what
became Chapter 5.