Obituary: Robin Cooke

Robin Cooke

* Lord Cooke, of Thorndon, Wellington. Died aged 80.

Robin Brunskill Cooke, described by some as New Zealand's greatest jurist and, notably, a member of the British House of Lords, was a man whose family was steeped in the law.

He was dedicated to his work. In 1985 at the time he was appointed as the seventh president of the Court of Appeal - the highest court in the land - the Herald found the then Sir Robin Cooke at work in an otherwise empty Court of Appeal building in Wellington.

It was Christmas Day. After a midday meal at home with his wife, their three sons and the boys' grandmothers, the new president had slipped away to write a reserved decision on an Auckland murder case.

"We try to finish the year's work before the end of the year," he explained.

Robin Cooke was himself the son of a judge and a grandson of a Crown Solicitor in Palmerston North. As a judge he made several significant rulings, stating on various occasions, for example, that there were limits to parliamentary sovereignty.

He was also prepared to invoke fundamental principles of justice to strike down Government actions. In one case he drew upon the Universal Declaration on Discrimination against Women to find that the Education Department was wrong to provide unequal removal expenses for women on transfer.

Lord Cooke was also in favour of a Bill of Rights.

In 1989, while he was its president, the Appeal Court was sharply critical of Government moves to sell Coalcorp without proper provision for Tainui.

He said token acknowledgments of the Treaty of Waitangi were not enough.

The following year he was to tell a Commonwealth law conference that New Zealand had deep-rooted racial problems. In looking at race relations cases in the New Zealand courts he noted that there had been few wins for Maori since the Treaty of Waitangi was signed.

Born in Wellington and educated at Wanganui Collegiate School, Victoria University in Wellington and at Cambridge University, England, Lord Cooke was admitted to the New Zealand bar in 1950. He was admitted to the English bar in 1954.

Made a Queen's Counsel in 1964, he became a judge of the Supreme Court in 1972. On his retirement from the Court of Appeal in 1996 he was granted a British life peerage.