The South African Constitutional Court Fifteen Years On

D. M. Davis, University of Cape Town, has published South African Constitutional Jurisprudence: The First Fifteen Years at 6 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 285 (2010). Here is the abstract.

South Africa became a constitutional democracy in 1994. This article reviews the first 15 years of constitutional jurisprudence produced by the country's first Constitutional Court. While the court interpreted the Constitution to eradicate racist, sexist, and homophobic legislation and similar common law rules, it did little to promote a comprehensive transformation of the legal system and thus the patterns of distribution that were supported by the law. This is illustrated particularly in the area of social and economic rights. The conclusion is thus reached that the new legal foundations are insufficiently resilient to hold the weight of constitutional expectation.

The full text is not available from SSRN.