I must admit that I am generally disinclined to read books about law because the few that I've tried have been turgid beyond belief, but this was outstanding. Mikaere is a law academic here in New Zealand, and this book is a collection of her papers, all of which are themed around Māori law and the teaching of Māori law. It should be dry. It is not. It is angry and confronting and lucid - all academic prose should be this readable! It is also fascinating, and enormously informative. I live in New Zealand, and you'd think I would have grown up with a lot of this but, not being Māori, I was never expected to learn it and was therefore never taught it. That, frankly, is a disgrace, and one of the many legacies of colonialism that needs to be tossed as soon as possible. 

Because Mikaere is an academic, a lot of the papers here revolve around teaching methods. Specifically, teaching Māori law to both Māori and Pakeha students, and the different challenges of doing both. One of the conclusions that she draws from this is that there are benefits to teaching these two groups separately, with the option of different tutorial streams within a paper, for instance, and given the stories that she tells from her own teaching experience that honestly seems like a rational alternative. Her time at Waikato University, for example, trying to help build a genuinely bicultural law school, comes across as challenging and frustrating, interspersed with small hopeful moments. As I said, I'm not familiar with law texts or law schools or anything like that, so a lot of this was outside my experience in a number of confronting ways, but I'm so glad I read it. What a stimulating book this is!