Although he describes his first experience as counsel in court as “a disaster, absolutely”, Stephen Kós, the country’s newest Supreme Court judge is nonetheless incredibly grateful for the valuable learning opportunity that early experience provided.
“I’d been rather thrown into my first court case. I gave a very learned discourse, which had caused [District Court Judge] Neville Jaine to look more and more puzzled,” Hon. Justice Kós explains.
“Eventually he simply said ‘that submission is curious and unsatisfactory’. He completely put me down with that epitaph but I’ll tell you what, you learn quickly. The Socratic teaching method at the Law School helped hugely in doing court work.”
Despite originally wanting to study architecture (his marks for secondary school art were “abjectly dreadful”), Justice Kós made a brilliant law student, winning the Chapman Tripp Centenary Prize for his graduating year.
He was a junior lecturer at the Law School for three years, and also holds an LLM (Cambridge, 1985). His stellar legal career has seen him be a partner in Perry Wylie Pope & Page, and Russell McVeagh. In 2005, he founded Stout Street Chambers, now the third largest barristers’ chambers in the country.
He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2007, and joined the judiciary in 2011, first at the High Court in Wellington, and then as a judge of the Court of Appeal in 2015. He was made president of that court the following year, and took the opportunity to make some positive changes, including adding sittings in Christchurch and Dunedin.
Justice Kós says with a background in commercial and environmental litigation, his work at the Court of Appeal provided another important learning opportunity.
“Apart from a few unavailing efforts at the start of my career, I didn’t do crime. No sensible criminal would have instructed me. But crime was perhaps the most interesting work I did at the Court of Appeal—I found a whole new intellectual satisfaction in grappling with it.”
He says he has always felt a responsibility to contribute to public life, having been strongly influenced by the experiences of his father, who had come to New Zealand as a refugee from Hungary after some harrowing experiences during World War II, including nearly dying at a prisoner- of-war camp in Siberia.
“These things give you a particular perspective of justice—even though I’d had a successful career at the bar, I’d always seen that there was a responsibility for me with that background to do more. For me the response was to become a judge and to contribute, both to doing practical justice and maybe making the law a little bit better.”
Although he was a “reluctant convert” to the idea of New Zealand moving away from the Privy Council to having its own final court, Justice Kós now champions the institution as providing greater connection to New Zealand’s unique conditions.
He was made a Supreme Court judge in April this year and looks forward to reading, writing and researching more deeply.