The inoperative community of law students: rethinking the foundations of legal culture
Loading...
Date
2014
Authors
Heyns, Anri
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Free State
Abstract
In 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.
Description
This article is based on the paper with the same title delivered at the South African Law Teachers Conference on 14 January 2014 at the University of the Witwatersrand, as well as the author’s LLM dissertation entitled “’n Tentatiewe gemeenskap en die demokrasie wat moet kom – ‘n regsfilosofiese ondersoek”, November 2011, University of Pretoria. <upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd – 05252012-143540>.
Keywords
Legal education, Human rights, Transformative constitutionalism, Democracy, Students
Citation
Heyns, A. (2014). The inoperative community of law students: rethinking the foundations of legal culture. Acta Academica: Law as a humanities discipline: transformative potential and political limits, 46(3), 77-103.