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''R v Symonds'' ''(The Queen v Symonds)'' incorporated the concept of Aboriginal title into New Zealand law and upheld the Government's pre-emptive right of purchase to Maori land deriving from the common law and expressed in the Treaty of Waitangi. Although the Native Lands Act 1862 waived Crown pre-emption, the notion of Aboriginal title has been revived in the 20th century to deal with Maori property rights. ==Background== Faced with a "virtually bankrupt colonial administration" Governor Robert FitzRoy had in 1843 waived the Crown's right of pre-emption to purchase Māori land, allowing settlers to directly buy land from Maori if they held certificates waiving the Crown's right. Under what became known as the "penny-an-acre" proclamation, 90,000 acres were bought by settlers. When Governor George Grey took office in 1845, he decided to take a test case, with a claimant seeking a writ of scire facias, to, "justify his refusal to award Crown grants over land to persons whose claims were based on those certificates."〔 The Attorney-General, William Swainson, appeared for Jermyn Symonds, and Thomas Bartley appeared for Charles Hunter McIntosh. The case involved an island in the Firth of Thames that McIntosh had bought from Māori, which he claimed extinguished all title that the Crown had. The same island was then conveyed by Grey as a Crown grant to Symonds. The argument for the plaintiff was that the Maori language text of the Treaty of Waitangi only gave the Crown the right of first refusal and not pre-emption over Maori land. As David Williams has noted, "The essential political issue at stake in the Gipps/Wentworth debates and in ''The Queen v Symonds'' related to the extent of Crown control over the profits to be made in the process of extinguishing Maori title and making land available to incoming settlers." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「R v Symonds」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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