Heyns, Anri2016-06-152016-06-152014Heyns, 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), 77-103.0587-2405 (print)2415-0479 (online)http://hdl.handle.net/11660/3063This 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>.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.enLegal educationHuman rightsTransformative constitutionalismDemocracyStudentsArticleUniversity of the Free State