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The South African Constitutional Court Fifteen Years On

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 11:37 AM PDT

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.

Research On Law

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 11:27 AM PDT

Mark C. Suchman, Brown University, and Elizabeth Mertz, University of Wisconsin, Madison, & American Bar Foundation, have published Toward a New Legal Empiricism: Empirical Legal Studies and New Legal Realism at 6 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 555 (2010). Here is the abstract.

The past decade has seen a return of interest in empirical research within the U.S. legal academy, hearkening back to a similar empirical turn during the ascendancy of Legal Realism in the New Deal era. However, the current revival of legal empiricism has emerged against the backdrop of several well-established traditions of empirical sociolegal research in the interdisciplinary law-and-society movement and in the social science disciplines. This article examines two of the most prominent manifestations of the "new" legal empiricism, empirical legal studies (ELS) and new legal realism (NLR), and it situates them within the preexisting sociolegal terrain. The analysis concludes by considering possible futures for empirical research on law.

The full text is not available from SSRN.