As President of the Court of Appeal, Sir Robin Cooke (as he then was) suggested that there may be common law rights that run so deep that parliament cannot abrogate them. One of these, he suggested, was a right of access to the 'ordinary Courts'.

This obviously raises the questions 'what is a Court?' and 'what is an ordinary Court?'. If the expression 'ordinary Court' means anything, it presumably delineates a sub-set of the set of 'Courts'. In other words there may be, at least theoretically, 'Courts' which are not 'ordinary Courts'.

This paper seeks to enquire into what is meant by the expression 'ordinary Court', to identify the values underlying claims of right of access to the ordinary Courts and to consider, in the light of those values, whether it is legitimate for the government to set up 'specialised Courts'. Throughout, the example for discussion will be the Employment Court created by the Employment Contracts Act 1991. That Court raises the question most starkly since its jurisdiction is expressed to be exclusive of the High Court, but there are other examples to be found in New Zealand such as the Planning Tribunal and the Maori Land Court.