Reception of EU trade mark laws in New Zealand

European trade mark norms found their way into the World Trade Organisation’s agreement on Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (WTO TRIPs) and into the law of New Zealand, a WTO member state. This chapter charts the journey of those norms by analysing treaty and legislative texts as well as the processes leading to TRIPs. It questions whether New Zealand law has taken on problematic aspects of EU trade mark law as well as beneficial ones. The chapter’s processes and findings exemplify the book’s theoretical framework of norm reception—adoption, adaptation, resistance and rejection. New Zealand law has proved resistant to the problems under study, whilst successfully adopting beneficial aspects and adapting them to local conditions