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A Hawaii Supreme Court ruling that landowners cannot fully exclude native Hawaiians from traditional and customary access to land provided the context for this discussion of the decision's implications and the work of a study group charged with proposing a path forward. Walter Heen, a retired judge of the Intermediate Court of Appeals who heard the PASH case at that level, traced the legal path from a narrow standing dispute to a Supreme Court opinion he described as a substantial expansion into questions of title. Dan Davidson, executive director of the Land Use Research Foundation of Hawaii, acknowledged that the development community accepted the ruling but pressed for clearer legal standards, as uncertainty over the scope of gathering rights was creating difficulties for land transactions and planning. Hannah K. Springer, a trustee of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs speaking as a native practitioner, argued that gathering rights are integral to Hawaiian cultural continuity and that existing constitutional and statutory protections need only be implemented, not revised. All three guests had served on the PASH study group, whose report had just been submitted to a state legislative committee.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.
Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
