In 2024, Salters Cartage Ltd, a waste recovery company, agreed to pay $4 million to settle a novel claim brought by the Commissioner of Police for forfeiture of company assets that were alleged to represent the unlawful proceeds of health and safety violations. This case raised concern in the New Zealand business community as to the extent to which regulatory infringements could result in forfeiture actions under the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009. This article conducts a comparative analysis of the regimes for the forfeiture of the proceeds of corporate crime in New Zealand, England and Wales and the United States. Specifically, it considers the extent to which a line can be drawn between a company’s legitimate income and the proceeds of crime, where legal infringements occur within business activity. This question in large part turns on whether a business is conducting truly unlawful activity or lawful activity conducted in an unlawful manner.

Discretionary trusts pose a significant challenge for the just division of relationship property under the Property (Relationships) Act 1976 (PRA). Clayton v Clayton marked a turning point, but subsequent cases have neglected two distinct findings in that case. The first is that the PRA is “social legislation”, and the second is that “worldly realism” is appropriate in the relationship property context. Instead, courts have tended to find that trust powers can only be relationship property when the donee of the power would not be constrained by fiduciary duties or the proper purpose rule when appointing all the trust property to themselves. Under that approach, a constrained power cannot be property. This article argues that a partial value approach to valuing trust powers is more coherent with Clayton and the PRA than the existing approach. A partial value approach would hold constrained powers to be property for the purposes of the PRA. The value of the power would merely be reduced to reflect the extent of the constraint. By adopting this partial value method, courts could balance respect for trust structures with the PRA’s dual purposes of obtaining a just division of relationship property and recognising each partner’s equal contribution to the relationship.

The question of finding the right comparator under s 19 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 has led to much confusion in discrimination litigation in this jurisdiction. The confusion arises because matters of comparability in relation to differential treatment cannot be divorced from matters of justification. To resolve it, we should dispense with comparability as a requirement under the first step of the Atkinson test and focus only on whether there has been materially disadvantageous treatment on the basis of a prohibited ground. In harder, indirect discrimination cases, this involves deciding what unprotected traits are sufficiently caused by or correlated with protected traits, such that differential treatment on the basis of an unprotected trait amounts to differential treatment on the basis of a protected trait. Only after this should we consider matters of justification by reference to incomparability. Doing so results in clearer analysis and prevents cutting off potentially meritorious claims too early in the analysis.