Ask New Zealand Law a Question in Plain English: Now With Real Court Judgments Too

New Zealand legislation is genuinely well published: legislation.govt.nz is a good, official source. What it isn't built for is a plain-English question. If you don't already know it's the Employment Relations Act you need, or which section of it, you're stuck searching by Act name and reading through sections yourself. CitedAnswers takes the other direction: ask what you actually want to know, such as "Can my landlord keep my bond?" or "Can my employer force me to work overtime?", and get back an answer grounded in the real Act and section, not a list of documents to go read.

Nearly 9,500 Acts of the New Zealand Parliament are indexed and searchable this way today. And as of this week, every answer can now draw on real court judgments too, not just the legislation.

Why case law changes the answer

A statute often states a general test rather than a specific answer: the Employment Relations Act says a dismissal must be what "a fair and reasonable employer could have done in all the circumstances," but it doesn't spell out exactly what that looks like in practice. That's what case law is for: real Employment Court decisions applying that exact test to real facts, showing what actually counted as a fair process and what didn't.

Nearly 10,000 real judgments are now indexed from Judicial Decisions Online | Te Puna Whakataunga, the Ministry of Justice's own official judgments database, Crown Copyright, openly licensed for reuse. When a question genuinely calls for it, CitedAnswers cites the actual case alongside the actual section, each one clickable through to the real text, exactly the same standard as every other citation on the site.

What this looks like on a real question

Here's what CitedAnswers gave back for "What happens if my employer dismisses me without following a fair process?": a genuine plain-English question, no legal terms, no Act name mentioned.

The answer cites the actual section (Employment Relations Amendment Act 2026, s 103A) and three real Employment Court judgments (Insight New Zealand v Johnstone, Idea Services v Wills, and FHE v Auckland Transport), each one clickable through to the real text.

Nobody had to know which Act governs unjustified dismissal, let alone which section, let alone which judgments have actually interpreted it. The question was asked the way a real person would ask it, and the answer came back grounded in both sides of the law: what the Act says, and how courts have actually applied it, the same as it would for a question about tenancy, consumer protection, or anything else the legislation covers.

Try it now

New Zealand Legislation is free to search, no account needed for a quick question. Ask something real and see what comes back, legislation and case law together wherever both genuinely apply.