New Zealand Case Law: Decisions & Judgments | LexChat

New Zealand Case Law

Costs against lay litigants
  • 29 May 2020

    WRIGHT v THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL [2020] NZHC 1166

    Citation
    [2020] NZHC 1166
    Court
    High Court

    The primary rule that lay litigants are not entitled to recover costs prevents the court from creating a special category of costs awards for self-represented litigants or from awarding a mathematical credit derived from scale costs; interlocutory successes should be recorded and may be taken into account by the judge fixing final costs rather than quantified as an immediate offset, and in the specific applications the appropriate outcome is no order as to costs for the defendants' security and review applications with certain interlocutory costs to lie where they fall and interlocutory succe…