About the publication:
Many constitutional commentators
have pointed to the central role that an engagement
with the apartheid past plays in the two post-apartheid
Constitutions. The AZAPO judgment in which the constitutionality
of the amnesty provisions of The Promotion of National
Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995 was challenged
is central to a sustained engagement with post-apartheid
law and the legacy of the past. A seminar took place
on 18 August 2006 at the University of South Africa
to provide a retrospective on the AZAPO judgment,
ten years after it was handed down. A number of
the essays in this collection were originally presented
as papers at the seminar.
Part 1 ('Memory and legal interpretation')
focuses explicitly on the ability of law to institute
and sustain a different politics of memory: How
is law related to the process of memory making?
How does law remember (if at all)? How does law's
memory relate to the wider process of aesthetic
memorialisation in society? In Part 2 ('Repairing
the past, restoring the future') the focus of the
essays shifts from jurisprudential reflections on
the politics of memory to more direct engagements
with issues of reparation and restoration in the
wake of past injustices: How is law related to the
process of reparation? How does law's justice relate
to the wider process of restoration in society?
The inability to
achieve constitutional closure, which is so dramatically
illustrated by the AZAPO judgment, equally applies
also to all other post-apartheid constitutional
judgments. Re-reading AZAPO therefore becomes constantly
re-reading and marking the limits of all law.
List of contributors:
- Jaco Barnard
Department of Private Law, University of Cape
Town.
- Michael Bishop
Clerk at the South African Constitutional Court.
- Lourens du Plessis
Department of Public Law, University of Stellenbosch.
- Patrick Lenta
Department of Philosophy, University of Kwa-Zulu
Natal.
- Wessel le Roux
Department of Constitutional, International and
Indigenous Law, University of South Africa.
- Tshepo Madlingozi
Department of Legal History, Comparative Law and
Jurisprudence, University of Pretoria.
- Nthabiseng Mogale
Department of Justice, South Africa.
- Johan Snyman
Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg.
- Karin van Marle
Department of Legal History, Comparative Law and
Jurisprudence, University of Pretoria.
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