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Item Open Access Administrative sociology and apartheid(University of the Free State, 2014) Pavlich, GeorgeAlthough sociological discourses are multiple and varied, with deeply critical versions challenging the auspices of apartheid, there is also a strand of what I call ‘administrative sociology’ that actively defined, supported and defended the vanguard of apartheid thinking and practice. It cloaked its biopolitical commitments beneath images of scientific neutrality, casting as necessary its assertions about apartheid society. The legacy of this strand of sociology remains subject to few explicit critiques, and its complicity in social atrocities is under-referenced (despite the decisive role of such professors of sociology as Hendrik Verwoerd, Jan De Wet Keyter and Geoffrey Cronjé). This article charts a brief genealogy of administrative sociology in context, focusing especially on the approach Cronjé adopted in his inaugural address, and indicating several dangers that attend to this sort of administrative sociology whose logic is still evident in strands of the discipline.Item Open Access These queer gardens: a South African story(University of the Free State, 2014) Barnard-Naudé, Jaco; De Vos, PierreTwo white male Afrikaans gay academics decide to respond to a call for papers to be presented at a conference with the theme “Gardens of justice” in Stockholm, Sweden in 2012. In the course of their attempt to co-author an academic paper on the history of the struggle for sexual minority freedom in South Africa, they are confronted by their own histories, contradictions, literary influences and context - confrontations that ultimately mirror the instability of subjectivity and the valences of a critically queer positionality in post-apartheid South Africa.Item Open Access The inoperative community of law students: rethinking the foundations of legal culture(University of the Free State, 2014) Heyns, AnriIn this article I contemplate the possibility of a relationship between democracy and the democracy to come experienced from within an inoperative community of law students. The reason for this contemplation is to ascertain to what extent law students can contribute to transformation or transformative constitutionalism as referred to by Karl Klare and Dennis Davis in their 2010 work. I investigate the radical and transcendental nature of human rights and democracy and their relationship with legal culture as a community of lawyers which also confirms the status quo and denies the radical nature of human rights and democracy. I argue that law students as an inoperative community can create human rights and democracy discourse which can promote transformation.Item Open Access The lawyer as mapmaker and the spatial turn in jurisprudence(University of the Free State, 2014) De Villiers, IsoldeSouth African legal culture is characterised by formalist error. The transformative project calls for different intellectual tools and approaches to argumentation in law. The spatial turn, in law and the broader humanities, possibly presents new ways of thinking in the form of cognitive mapping and mapping loss. Legal rules and legal culture, over time, play an important role in how spaces are regulated and constituted. If legal education in South Africa has spatial justice as its aim, an acknowledgement of the palimpsestic nature of law and space in South Africa is required. The spatial turn presents an awakening to the relationship between space and time and can be situated at various stages of the twentieth century in philosophy, literature, art and other disciplines in the humanities. In this contribution, I am concerned with what the spatial turn could possibly mean in the context of legal education and for jurisprudence.Item Open Access The crises in legal education(University of the Free State, 2014) Modiri, JoelThis article reflects on recent debates on legal education in South Africa. I argue that the value of legal education should not be indexed by how well it serves the needs and expectations of the legal profession and judiciary, but rather how it contributes to a new jurisprudence suited to the legal, social and political transformation of South Africa. I therefore argue against a reading of the crisis of legal education as one that is instrumental and economical (the inability to produce efficient legal professionals) and focus rather on the jurisprudential crises that lie at the heart of law and jurisprudence, namely the crisis set in motion by the shift from a general jurisprudence, centered on the ideal of justice, to a restricted jurisprudence, focused merely on the coherence of the positive law. I argue that what is needed as a response to this crisis is a critical legal education, or an approach to the study and teaching of law grounded in a critical jurisprudence. The turn to a critical legal education suggested in this article is then further linked to an understanding of law as a humanities discipline and to the humility that this will require of legal academics, lawyers and judges.Item Open Access Law as a humanities discipline: transformative potential and political limits(University of the Free State, 2014) Van Marle, KarinAbstract not availableItem Open Access A politics of human rights – the right to rights as universal right to politics?(University of the Free State, 2014) Kistner, UlrikeConfronted by the charge of depoliticisation levelled at human rights frameworks and interventions, I investigate the possibility of a politics of human rights at the core of democratic politics. In doing so, I am guided by Hannah Arendt’s reconstitutive critique, and Claude Lefort’s analysis of political modernity, which could be seen to converge in a justification of a ‘politics of human rights’ and, even more specifically, of ‘the political’ of human rights. Central in this regard is Arendt’s postulation of “the Right to have rights”, which would meet the criteria for “equaliberty” (Balibar), a symbolic division (Lefort), and intensive universality (Balibar), which, in turn, circumscribe the concept of ‘the political’.Item Open Access Stop the illusory nonsense! Teaching transformative delict(University of the Free State, 2014) Zitzke, EmileIn this article, I provide a few thoughts on what it means to teach law, specifically ‘law of delict’, ‘critically’, as a response to conservative legal culture, which, I believe, currently prevails in South African legal education. By ‘critically’ I mean compliance with broad themes of critical legal theory, especially drawing from Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and its successive theoretical progeny (Feminist Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory). I will tackle this project from the point of view that Klare’s transformative constitutionalism is mandated by the Constitution, and that this theory is a South African manifestation of critique. Therefore, relying on specific aspects of transformative constitutionalism, I will highlight how we can teach delict in a constitutionally mandated transformative context by employing critical pedagogy.Item Open Access Legal educators – the peddler of precedent, the skill builder and the socially conscious knowledge generator(University of the Free State, 2014) Bezuidenhout, Inez; Karels, MichelleThe time is rife to encourage law teachers to evaluate their individual subjective views of the law before embarking on another study of best-suited methodologies for modular teaching. This article does not aim to entertain the various methodologies of legal education in order to determine a best-fit or fit-for-purpose standard of legal teaching. It rather examines the epistemological importance of the law teacher’s intrinsic view of law, and its translation in legal education, thereby recognising the continuous transformation of exploratory educational discourse. The article purports that the personal views of law held by a law teacher are expressed in the way law is interpreted and articulated to students. In illustration of the above premise, we refer to three general types of law teacher. The first type honours the positive law, thereby preserving the recognition of contextualised doctrinal institutions of the law. The second, and most sought after in the contemporary context, prizes applied skill as a commodity necessary for practice. The third type augments teaching philosophy with social responsibility and therein the pursuit of good justice. We conclude that all three types have advantages and challenges. However, South Africa, as a plural society, requires law teachers who acknowledge that law has a social mandate and that the knowledge they instil must be fused with social consciousness in order for students to contribute to both society and the development of law as a professional discipline.Item Open Access Anthropology and development: culture, morality and politics in a globalised world(University of the Free State, 2014) Botes, LuciusAbstract not availableItem Open Access Reflections on legacy, complicity, and legal education(University of the Free State, 2014) Van Marle, KarinI reflect on the relation between complicity and the legacy of South African jurisprudence and law, and tentatively consider continuances between the civil law tradition (Roman- Dutch common law) as well as present human rights and constitutional law. I also raise notions on reconfiliation, frailty and complex writing as possible alternatives. My aim is to think with students and colleagues and to re-imagine a legal culture and legal education that could be different from the present one.Item Open Access Afrikaner nationalism, apartheid and the perversion of critique(University of the Free State, 2014) Eloff, ReneIn this article I investigate the relationship between Afrikaner nationalism, apartheid and philosophy in the context of the intellectual history of the University of the Free State. I show how two philosophers that were respectively associated with the Department of Political Science and the Department of Philosophy, H J Strauss (1912-1995) and E A Venter (1914-1968), drew on the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd to justify separate development. I argue that their interpretation does not simply amount to a wilful misunderstanding of Dooyeweerd, but rather that the foundational moment of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy involves an interpretive violence that accommodates this interpretation.Item Open Access An ethical (anti-)constitutionalism? Transformation for a transfigured public(University of the Free State, 2014) Delport, TerblancheHow do we critically engage South African constitutionalism today? This is the basic question that will animate this article. In order to investigate this, I will specifically look at the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996 (the Constitution) from the perspective of an ethics of liberation. This investigation will proceed by way of two main points of discussion, namely an exposition of Enrique Dussel’s formulation of an ethics of liberation and an application of this ethics of liberation related to the Constitution as critique. The three fundamental principles – material, formal, feasible – of an ethics of liberation will be discussed and applied, in the form of three questions, to the current constitutional order. These questions will then be discussed and answered in order to show how the Constitution came into being due to a process of unethical feasibility.