Suspended #MeToo lawyer wrongly excluded from panel, judge finds
The lawyer suspended in the wake of a #MeToo scandal should not have been stopped from sitting on an expert consenting panel for resource consent, a judge says.
James Gardner-Hopkins is sitting out his three-year suspension from practising as a lawyer, imposed for misconduct involving inappropriate touching of five summer interns when he was a partner at the prominent law firm Russell McVeagh in Wellington in 2015.
The suspension is due to end in February 2025.
Gardner-Hopkins currently describes himself on social media as an experienced consultant and strategic adviser. His previous area of expertise was environment and planning law, and he led the Māori legal group at Russell McVeagh. He is of Niuean descent.
Ngāti Paoa Trust Board nominated him to be a member of the Botanic Riverhead Panel, but the panel convener Judge Laurie Newhook refused to appoint him, saying he could take into account matters including character and integrity, and the circumstances of Gardner-Hopkins’ suspension.
The trust board took a case to the High Court over the refusal to accept Gardner-Hopkins, and in a decision made public yesterday, the judge agreed with it.
He said Newhook’s decision was unlawful and quashed it. However, in the meantime another person was appointed to the panel and the resource consent consideration proceeded.
Although Justice Peter Churchman did not accept all the trust board’s arguments, he agreed that the convener was wrong to take into account that the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal had disciplined Gardner-Hopkins and that he was suspended from practice.
The convener should have focused on Gardner-Hopkins’ ability to perform the role without bringing the panel into disrepute, rather than on past events and misconduct, the judge said.
Given that Gardner-Hopkins had been suspended, taken therapeutic interventions and had been held to account, the risk of him doing something that brought the panel into disrepute in the eyes of someone fully informed, was not a matter that justified the convener’s decision, the judge said.
Nothing in the decisions of the disciplinary tribunal, the High Court, or the Environment Court, required him to decline Gardner-Hopkins’ nomination, ‘‘nor indeed gave any good grounds to do so’’, Justice Churchman said.
Members of the panel did not have to be lawyers.
Another Māori trust board had wanted Gardner-Hopkins to represent it in the Environment Court as a ‘‘general representative’’, but the court refused to allow it.
In the Ngāti Paoa case, stopping Gardner-Hopkins from sitting on the panel, a role not acting in a legal capacity, would be punishing him again for the earlier misconduct, the judge said.
The panel was to consider resource consent for a retirement village, childcare centre and cafe at Riverhead, north-west Auckland, an area to which Ngāti Paoa has a strong connection.
Fourteen iwi authorities were asked if they wanted to nominate a member of the panel but only Ngāti Paoa did.
The expert consenting panel was administrative and ‘‘quasi judicial’’, replacing both the consent authority and the Environment Court in certain fasttrack resource consent processes, Justice Churchman said.
The iwi’s traditional lands are on Waiheke Island, and its area of interest is on the western shores of the Hauraki Gulf and eastern suburbs of Auckland, from Te Aroha to Warkworth. It takes in islands in the Tāmaki Strait and reaches across to the Coromandel Peninsula.