Over the last two decades, claims that the Doctrine of Discovery (based on a 1493 papal bull) had some bearing on New Zealand’s colonisation have been gaining force in academic and popular literature, with a nexus emerging between historical and legal anal yses of its purported role in British intervention in the country from the eighteenth century. This article explores the bases for these claims, and introduces a distinction between functionalist and intentionalist approaches to interpreting Britain’s colo nisation of New Zealand as a means of contextualising and accounting for the explanatory appeal of the Doctrine as a first cause of New Zealand’s colonisation.