Tony Angelo: A golden anniversary
For half a century Professor Tony Angelo QC has been a fixture at Victoria’s Law School, where he’s dedicated a considerable part of his career to looking out for New Zealand’s smaller Pacific neighbours.
2017 has been a big year for Tony—in June he was appointed Queen’s Counsel, and today he celebrates 50 years of teaching in Victoria’s Faculty of Law. However, Tony’s connection to Victoria goes even further back, as a former Law student himself in the early 1960s.
In his Queen’s Counsel announcement, former Attorney-General Christopher Finlayson singled Tony out for his “extraordinary contribution to the law, particularly to legal education and to constitutional development in the South Pacific”.
Tony says his long association with Pacific states began shortly after graduating from Victoria in 1967.
“When I finished my post-graduate studies, I developed an interest in the legal system of Mauritius—in March 1968 that island became independent. It had mixed law inherited from the British and the French, and my interest was in comparative law, so I went there.”
Tony strengthened his connection to the Pacific Islands in the late 1970s when New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs engaged him in the Pacific. Tony was seconded to the Solomon Islands on a four-week mission, and later contributed to a 1981 report to the United Nations on the legal system of Tokelau.
“From there my involvement in the Pacific just grew—Niue, Norfolk Island, the Cook Islands… it just accumulated, so to speak.”
Tony was also instrumental in establishing the Law programme at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in 1994. Prior to this, Pasifika students who wanted to study law had to do so in other countries like New Zealand or Australia. Tony believes it’s important for Pasifika people to be able to learn about law in a Pacific setting.
“First of all, we don’t tend to teach Pacific law in New Zealand—so they would come through their law degree knowing about New Zealand law and quite a bit about English law. They’d go home to a system sometimes with few law books and much of the country run according to custom—how well prepared might you say they were?
“Whereas if they study law at the USP, the programme draws on the laws of all the Pacific countries, so they know what the neighbouring countries are doing. There’s also a lot of emphasis on how government law interacts with custom—for instance around land, marriage, divorce, or adoption.
“They’re learning their own laws, discussing the problems that are most likely to occur within the Pacific environment. They’re also operating in their own language and culture—they’re more at home and I believe that makes their learning easier.”
More recently, Tony’s attention has been focused on reviewing the Civil Code of the Seychelles to meet the island nation’s present-day needs, a task not without its challenges.
“The Code was translated from French to English in 1975, but not reformed—so what they had was essentially an English version of Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804.”
The review was approved by Cabinet in June and is currently waiting to be passed in the Seychelles Parliament. A common thread throughout Tony’s work in the Pacific is striving to provide access to the law and to make it more intelligible to people.
“The law is there—but can people find it, and do they know what it is?”
Closer to home, Tony has also been busy teaching the second-year legal research, writing and mooting courses at Victoria. Not surprisingly, Tony says a lot has changed over his long teaching career at the Faculty.
“I’ve recently been teaching a class of 300 students. I think in my own first-year Law class there were only 40 of us. There were also only one or two women, whereas today about half of students are women.
“The law has also become much more technical—there’s more of it.”
Tony says he has high hopes for his current students. “The work they do is phenomenal. Students today have unbelievable resources. We used to wait for airmail copies of law reports—now you can find legal judgments instantly on your phone.
“Students’ abilities are being extended in a way that was certainly much more difficult, if at all possible, in the past. I worry sometimes that it’s become a bit competitive, but they seem to be coping.” Asked what he sees in store for the future of law and legal studies, Tony smiles.
“Come back and ask me in another 50 years.”