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4 NZLSJ v (2023)

handle is hein.journals/nwzllws4 and id is 1 raw text is: Foreword THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE SUSAN GLAZEBROOK JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF NEW ZEALAND It gives me great pleasure to write this foreword to the 2023 edition of the New Zealand Law Students'Journal. It is some years since the publication of the last volume of this journal and the New Zealand legal landscape has been the poorer for its absence. It is very important that young legal scholars have outlets for writing about the topics that interest them. And it is equally important that lawyers, judges, academics and policy-makers are exposed to new and original thinking. The articles in this issue certainly fulfil the aims of those involved in the journal's revival. The articles are diverse and original but some themes do emerge. The first relates to access to justice, fair trials and fair outcomes in criminal cases. This is certainly a priority for the courts and the suggestions made in the three articles offer interesting analyses which are relevant to this theme. Kelly Young in Communication Assistance and Participatory Rights of Neurodiverse Children in the Youth Justice System argues for the greater provision of specialist communication assistance to child and youth offenders with neurodisabilities in order to fulfil New Zealand's obligations under Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. She also argues that, in order to create an environment that allows full participation of the child or young person, lawyers, judges and youth justice facilitators should also be trained in effective communication strategies. Sarah Shanahan in Piercing Through the Veil of Jury Deliberations: An Analysis of the Jury Secrecy Rule and Proposals for Reform argues that courts should have a greater ability on appeal to investigate genuine and serious instances of juror misconduct in the course of deliberations in order to safeguard fair trial rights. Vincent Kenworthy's article on Predicting Sentencing Decisions of the New Zealand Courts Using Support Vector Machines is a timely contribution to the current debate about the possible role of artificial intelligence in the justice sector. In his article he uses a dataset of New Zealand rape sentences to test his hypothesis that textual analysis by artificial intelligence of the facts of previous sentencing decisions can be used to predict outcomes of future sentencing v