Articles

HOW should a judge respond when discriminatory aspects of customary law conflict with the constitution? Earlier this month Judge Oagile Dingake of the high court in Gaberone, Botswana, declared his country’s adoption laws unconstitutional for just this reason, in a...

IT could be one of the smallest damages awards made by a high court in recent times, but the R775 plus interest ordered by Judge Dhaya Pillay represents an enormous victory for street traders everywhere in South Africa. Pillay, sitting in the high court in Durban,...

IN a landmark judgment throwing down the gauntlet to government departments that refuse to obey court orders, the high court has found a municipal manager guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to six months in jail. The judgment (Matjhabeng local municipality...

TAKE a drought, an empty dam and 20 missing buffalo and it promises to be a good legal story. Add former Springbok centre Hennie le Roux into the mix and there’s a ruck in the making. He’s the owner of Crown River Safaris, a private reserve on Medbury Farm outside...

WHEN three judges of a top court interpreted the law so it gives bizarre benefits to an accused in gang rape trials their unreported decision went almost unnoticed. But this week saw a full court of the high court in Grahamstown applying the law as expounded by the...

A MAJOR municipality has been warned that if it doesn’t improve the way it deals with tenders the courts may step in and award the tender to the company that should have won if proper procedures had been followed. The Supreme Court of Appeal also warned this week that...

LIKE most readers I can still clearly remember some aspects of going to school as a child – horror lest one’s parents come to class and ‘make a fuss’, for example. And, though it was slightly less long ago, I can also remember some of the difficulties of being a...

AT last, eight years later, the courts are finally done with the three cops who shot and killed a farmer in the Eastern Cape. Their appeal against conviction and sentence was rejected last week, and two of them – the third, Mlungisi Papu has since died – will now...

SO bad were services in the Ngaka Modiri Molema district municipality that the provincial authorities used their extraordinary powers under the Constitution to dissolve the municipality in September this year and appoint an administrator to sort things out. Since...

HOW does a trivial dispute between neighbours over hooting at the gate become a matter for police arrest, overnight detention in cells, a trial and conviction? – A high court judge who had to hear the matter on appeal has speculated that it must have been because of...