The colonial history of the courts in New Zealand is one of confusion and often makeshift adaptation. Legislative and ideological structures, including those surrounding the venerable institution of the common law jury, often meshed poorly with the realities of colonial society and everyday legal practice. Initial attempts to accommodate or incorporate the interests and customs of the majority indigenous population further clouded the picture. These attempts were largely nullified by settler antagonism and the cultural destruction wrought by the colonisation process. Jury trial in New Zealand dates back to the earliest years of colonisation and initially represented an uninterrupted transmission of the English legal heritage. Both the Supreme Court and the lesser courts were established in 1841, the year following the formal annexation of the colony and its separation from the Australian colony of New South Wales. The new courts had their jurisdiction defined in terms of the existing jurisdiction of the English courts, drew their personnel from English-born and -qualified practitioners, and operated according to English procedure. Grand, common, special juries and even the ancient aliens jury, de medietate linguae, were all pressed into service. Not surprisingly, the colonists soon adapted the English traditions and structures to the realities of their colonial setting. In this article, we briefly sketch the subsequent evolution of both the civil and criminal jury and of the attempts to incorporate the indigenous Maori people within a set of notionally separate arrangements which were nonetheless exclusively derived from European notions of criminal justice. We then outline the current structures and the issues and concerns that have emerged with some force over the last few years. As with many common law jurisdictions that still retain trial by jury, the civil jury in New Zealand is seldom used. However, the criminal jury has undergone something of a revival over the last decade and a half. This, in turn, has generated concerns at the political, judicial, administrative, and public levels that are currently being addressed by the New Zealand Law Commission and through a