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Equity crowdfunding is the biggest thing to happen in securities law in nearly a century—and New Zealand is a worldwide leader in the field. This new form of Internet-based securities market is modelled on the prior concept of reward crowdfunding, and it allows start-up companies and other small businesses to sell shares directly to the public (the ‘crowd’) without having to provide the usual (and costly) mandatory disclosures. The idea originated in the United States, but New Zealand quickly jumped out in front, launching its equity crowdfunding market two years ahead of the United States (and three years ahead of Australia).

Using original research collected by the author during a six-month residency in New Zealand, this article reports on the methods used in the New Zealand equity crowdfunding market to create a functioning system of entrepreneurial finance in the absence of mandatory disclosure or other significant regulation. Some methods are borrowed from venture capital and angel investors; other methods are distinctive to crowdfunding. All in all, the light-handed New Zealand model works well, and has proved much more effective than the regulatory-heavy version adopted in the United States: scaled for the size of its economy, and focusing on the first year in each jurisdiction, New Zealand hosted thirteen times as many crowdfunding campaigns which collectively raised thirty times as much capital as the United States. New Zealand has also handily outperformed other countries with equity crowdfunding markets, including Germany and Japan.

In this article it is suggested that the appropriate conceptual model to use when investigating, presenting and interpreting facts involving intimate partner violence is an understanding of intimate partner violence as a gendered pattern of harm that operates as a form of social entrapment. The concept of entrapment is explained, an understanding of entrapment is contrasted with traditional approaches to thinking about intimate partner violence in the criminal justice context, and why the conceptual framing of intimate partner violence matters when applying the law to primary victims who are also offenders is discussed. The defence of self-defence for primary victims who kill their abusers and the criminal prosecution of mothers for neglectful parenting are used as case examples in this discussion.

New Zealand’s separate employment jurisdiction is designed to provide special expertise in adjudicating disputes and to keep costs low for the parties, expediting resolution and preserving where possible the parties relationships. For this reason, legislation provides that issues of construction of an employment agreement cannot be appealed from the Employment Court to the general appellate courts: the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court (the ‘appellate jurisdiction’). Nevertheless, recent court decisions suggest that the scope of the appellate jurisdiction is growing wider, threatening the reasons for a separate employment jurisdiction. The Supreme Court has recently stated that, at appellate level, “the construction of collective agreements is not off limits altogether”. The only perceived limitation is that it is necessary for an appellate court to find “an operative error of interpretive principle”. But there is insufficient logical or theoretical basis for this expansion of the appellate jurisdiction. Given the current state of the case law authorities, the only practicable solution is legislative reform. The timing is now opportune, given the intention by the Parliamentary Counsel Office to initiate an Employment Law Revision Bill between 2018 and 2020. This would be the perfect time to include a statutory amendment to remedy the position regarding the appellate jurisdiction to consider the construction of employment agreements.