We Found Love (Community) in a Hopeless Place (Law School)

Ethan Rogacion (he/him)

Ahh, the Old Government Building. Home of a bizarre exhibition about the history of the public service, an occasional meandering Sir Geoffrey Palmer, and dozens of confused second-years navigating maze-like corridors in search of LAWS 213. While certainly one of the grandest buildings in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, OGB is not exactly what one imagines when asked to conjure up a good building for a community of learning. Neither is Von Zedlitz, but I digress. 

A Storied Space

Situated on the corner of Bowen St and Lambton Quay, it’s hard for any tourist in this city to miss OGB: the second largest wooden building in the Southern Hemisphere. 

The building first opened in 1876, and was designed under the instruction of this country’s only ever Colonial Architect, William Clayton. According to NZHistory, as a direct result of “penny-pinching”, Clayton was forced to forego his initial intent of permanent, grander materials in favour of more cost-effective mimic stone. How poetic.

Originally, the building was designed as a home for the civil service, directly opposite the site of this country’s legislative power at Parliament. But, as the nation grew, its need for more bureaucrats and administrators followed, quickly outpacing the size constraints of the Old Government Building. By 1990, the last public servants from the Education Department had left the building for good.

Something New in Something Old

In 1996, new life was breathed into the building Te Kauhanganui Tātai Ture - the Faculty of Law - moving into OGB from its old home in Rankine Brown, now the Kelburn campus library. However, as one might imagine, moving a student body into a stalwart of Pōneke’s cityscape comes with its own unique challenges.

For one: space. To make up for a lack of rooms big enough to fit 150 students, just dying to learn about Fitzgerald v Muldoon [1976] 2 NZLR 615 (HC), the campus reopened 1996 with a new awkward, hexagonal building in the rear courtyard. This would come to house two of OGB’s four lecture theatres. The other two were, just like most other rooms in the building, set up in converted office space in the main building. From tutorial rooms to the law common room, you get a sense that this place used to be something much, much grander.

But the second and more pressing issue, as it was then and as it remains now is this: how do you make students feel at home in a building which was never designed with them in mind? Ever since its move down the hill, law students have taken it on themselves to make the experience of law school a better one for all that roam its halls. 

Carving Out Spaces

If you visit OGB and walk about the ground floor, you’ll inevitably come across the rep group corridor. Directly next to each other, you’ll find clubrooms for groups representing nearly every demographic at the Faculty - as Dean of Law Prof. Geoff McLay told me, “you can’t help but find a room where you’re welcome in.” 

While the largest law rep group, the Victoria University Law Students’ Society (VUWLSS),  serves the student body in the faculty at large, other rep groups representing marginalised identities in OGB have begun to develop and strengthen. in recent decades. From groups like Ngā Rangahautira, the Pasifika Law Students’ Society and the Asian Law Students’ Association to the Feminist Law Society and Rainbow Law, you do certainly get the feeling that Prof. McLay is right. Increasingly, thanks primarily to the work of student groups, the Faculty has become a place which encompasses the breadth of student experiences.

This, by no means, happened overnight however - and didn’t happen without some good-old student activism. Rooms in the rep group hallway were only handed over to students in 2024 - it is now just over a year since, for the first time since its opening, the building had rooms dedicated to serving the minority groups which it houses. This came after years of pressure from Law School rep groups, and is a physical reminder of the ongoing struggle and need to carve out spaces for everyone in this historically imposing building.

Helena Palmer, President of VUWLSS, said that “The value of having VUWLSS and all the volunteer-run representative groups on campus lies in the community we contribute to and the representation we offer.”

Palmer added that another key function of VUWLSS and other rep groups is their history of advocacy for the needs of tauira at the law school. “We also manage a productive and close relationship with the faculty, which is useful for when students raise any concerns.” Further, she noted that, “Perhaps the most important things that rep groups aim to contribute to life at the law school is opportunity and community.”

My Rep Group Story

For this writer, though, the group at the Faculty that I have the strongest connection to is ALSA: the Asian Law Students’ Society. 

I moved to Te Whanganui-a-Tara in 2023 to study law and philosophy - tides away from the (deeply annoying) stereotype of Filipinos going into the medical industry. As someone who moved to Pōneke from a high school where over 50% of the roll were people of Asian whakapapa, I came with the expectation that this move would sever me from my Asian-ness, undoing years of my love for my language and my people.

In my first few weeks at Te Herenga Waka, by more-or-less happenstance, I stumbled into the open arms of ALSA. I was lucky enough to find a space which embraced Asian cultures, and Asian kai, and Asian manaakitanga. I heard from experienced Asian lawyers and legal professionals about the importance of embracing your heritage at work. Through ALSA, I have had the opportunity to put this into practice in a moot before Aotearoa’s first Asian woman judge. And also one of my lecturers. Deeply chill indeed.

I am most certainly not alone in this regard. JB Acuña - ALSA’s Events Coordinator - told me that, “Socially, I feel like I can be more myself at Law School [thanks to ALSA], because I see more people of similar upbringing and similar cultures.” There is something deeply empowering about going from lecture theatres - which are predominantly filled with Pākeha - to ALSA events, filled with energetic, vibrant and diverse tauiwi.

Outside of moots, barbecues and Mr. Whippy visits, however, I think that the biggest utility of the law rep groups is that they embed in the Law School the thing which its grand visage could otherwise destroy: community. In a building which has foundations firmly planted in colonial bureaucracy, it strikes me as beautiful and fitting to see the diversity of this nation’s future lawyers carving out space for ourselves.

ALSA Media Coordinator Sarah Ko told Salient that she thinks rep groups like hers are, “really important because [they] give you a sense of community.” Indeed, it is hard to understate how significant a feat it is to make non-Pākeha students, from non-law families, feel at home and at ease in OGB. As Ko said, community-building is especially important in spaces like OGB, “where it can be really scary, and it could seem cutthroat and is cutthroat. Having that family group and friends to fall back onto when you’re stressed out … is really important.”

Towards the Future

Looking ahead, the rep groups at OGB look to be entrenching themselves - and the whanaungatanga which they foster - not only into the law school, but into the wider legal profession. 

A member of VUWFLS, the Faculty’s Feminist Law Society, told me that having a space to promote feminism in the law school is important given the state of the legal industry as a whole. “Law is built on systems which seek to oppress all sorts of people including women and people of marginalised genders,” she said.

Eleesha Silva, President of ALSA, told Salient that it’s more important now than ever to have groups which reflect the diversity of Pōneke, and of Te Herenga Waka. “Having rep groups in the law school is vital for diversifying the law school and making it reflect the modern New Zealand. New Zealand is a mixing pot, so we need law school to reflect that.”

While the building the law school finds itself in, and indeed the content of much of legal education, is inherently colonial in nature, the future of law and the legal profession need not be. This starts from the bottom up - in our law school, our clubrooms and in the hallways of our University. By diversifying the law school and the experiences it offers, the world of transactions and litigation and the professional legal sphere diversifies too.

As Silva explained, “By having groups [like ALSA] in the law school, we’re encouraging people who identify with those groups to come to law school in the first place. Otherwise, it’s quite an intimidating facade - where the building is old and the law we’re learning about is old.” 

But, through its work in the past and into the future, Silva says that, “[ALSA is] encouraging more people to come through law school and also giving them the opportunities and facilities to enter the legal profession.”