Even with the emergence of Parliament as the law-maker, the laws of the constitution, the principles of private law and the relationships between government and people continued to evolve in the courts.  This process continued through the last century (long after the teachings of Montesquieu and Dicey), as the rules of constitutional and administrative law were attuned to the growth of government. As parliaments became better supported and assumed more direct responsibility for the whole legal  system,  the  law-making  process  came  to  be  perceived  by  some  as  of  the  essence  of democracy and not the business of unelected judges. I do not wish to comment on the current, rather superficial arguments directed to so-styled “judicial  activism”,  “accountability”  and  the  like,  save  to  make  the  comparison  as  I  have done, between the apprehensions of the present and the realities of the past. I prefer to concentrate on what Professor Jaffe² described as “the total legal performance”.   An efficient contemporary legal system reflecting established values must be the product of co-operative  interaction  between  the  various  contributors,  including  the  courts.    I  refer  to contributors because I want to focus on the formulation and development of the law rather than on restraints and balances such as may be provided by constitutional courts. The processes for the review and development of the law are different today.  Professional law  reform  agencies  (and  in  New  Zealand  their  predecessor  Law  Reform  Committees), together with large and expert bureaucracies, have superseded the judicial development of the common law in most areas.  The role of the courts in development of the law has not ceased but it has changed, being now complementary to the primary law reform processes. This is a comparatively small country.  Of course, the responsibilities of governments are not proportionate to the size of a country or its population.  But the complexities of parliamentary government  can  be  no  less  in  larger  countries.    Even  here,  it  may  be  not  unreasonable  to wonder   whether,   as   presently   organised,   parliamentary   capacity   is   not   too   small   to accommodate  all  modern  law-making  proposals.    The  business  of  parliaments  in  modern democracies   necessarily   encompasses   political   debate   of   current   issues,   ensuring   the 2 Louis L. Jaffe, English and American Judges as Lawmakers (1969)