Conference Only

This year's Criminal Bar Association Conference will be in Auckland over the weekend of 5 and 6 August 2023. The conference sessions will be held at the University of Auckland School of Business, and the conference dinner will be held at the Pullman.  Attendance at the full conference fulfills 10 CPD hours - the full annual requirement.

This year our keynote speaker is Judge Nancy Gertner.  Judge Nancy Gertner is a graduate of Barnard College and Yale Law School where she was an editor on The Yale Law Journal. She received her M.A. in Political Science at Yale University. She has been an instructor at Yale Law School, teaching sentencing and comparative sentencing institutions, since 1998. She was appointed to the bench in 1994 by President Clinton. She has written and spoken widely on various legal issues and has appeared as a keynote speaker, panelist or lecturer concerning civil rights, civil liberties, employment, criminal justice and procedural issues, throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Her autobiography, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate, was released on April 26, 2011. Her book, The Law of Juries, co-authored with attorney Judith Mizner, was published in 1997 and updated in 2010. She has published articles, and chapters on sentencing, discrimination, and forensic evidence, women’s rights, and the jury system. In September of 2011, Judge Gertner retired from the federal bench and became part of the faculty of the Harvard Law School teaching a number of subjects including criminal law, criminal procedure, forensic science and sentencing, as well as continuing to teach and write about women’s issues around the world.

The speakers for this years conference include:

• Judge Nancy Gertner – keynote speaker
• Appellate Judges Panel - Chief Justice Dame Helen Winkelmann, Justice Cooper, Justice Thomas 
• District Court Judges Panel
• Scott Optican – Evidence Law Update 
• Panel session facilitated by Fiona Guy Kidd KC and Nick Chisnall KC and involving Downs J on counter-intuitive evidence and Chris Stevenson on exclusion of confession evidence
• Forensic Group – horror show
• Dr Ian de Terte and Yvette Tinsley – the potentially traumatic nature of legal work and how to combat it.

The conference price includes attendance at our conference dinner, which will be held on the evening of Saturday 6 August at the Pullman Hotel.  The after dinner speaker will be Judge Nancy Gertner.  Partners are most welcome to attend the conference dinner; the cost of an additional dinner guest is $220.