Ubuntu And The Law: African Ideals And Postapartheid Jurisprudence (just Ideas)
by Drucilla Cornell /
2012 / English / PDF
2.5 MB Download
This is the first comprehensive casePub to address the relationship
of uBuntu to law. It also provides the most important critical
articles on the use of uBuntu, both by the Constitutional Court and
by other levels of the judiciary in South Africa.Although uBuntu is
an ideal or value rooted in South Africa, its purchase as a
performative ethic of the human goes beyond its roots in African
languages. Indeed, this casePub helps break through some of the
stale antinomies in the discussions of cultures and rights, since
both the courts and the critical essays discuss ubuntu as not
simply an indigenous or even African ideal but one that is its own
terms calls for universal justification. The efforts of the
Constitutional Court to take seriously competing ideals of law and
justice has led to original ethical reasoning, which has
significant implications for post apartheid constitutionalism and
law more generally. uBuntu, then, as it is addressed as an activist
ethic of virtue and then translated into law, helps to expand the
thinking of a modern legal system's commitment to universality by
deepening discussions of what inclusion and equality actually mean
in a postcolonial country. Since uBuntu claims to have universal
purchase, its importance as a way of thinking about law and justice
is not limited to South Africa but becomes important in any human
rights discourse that is not limitedly rooted in Western European
ideals. Thus this book will be a crucial resource for anyone who is
seriously grappling with human rights, postcolonial
constitutionalism, and competing visions of the relations between
law and justice.
This is the first comprehensive casePub to address the relationship
of uBuntu to law. It also provides the most important critical
articles on the use of uBuntu, both by the Constitutional Court and
by other levels of the judiciary in South Africa.Although uBuntu is
an ideal or value rooted in South Africa, its purchase as a
performative ethic of the human goes beyond its roots in African
languages. Indeed, this casePub helps break through some of the
stale antinomies in the discussions of cultures and rights, since
both the courts and the critical essays discuss ubuntu as not
simply an indigenous or even African ideal but one that is its own
terms calls for universal justification. The efforts of the
Constitutional Court to take seriously competing ideals of law and
justice has led to original ethical reasoning, which has
significant implications for post apartheid constitutionalism and
law more generally. uBuntu, then, as it is addressed as an activist
ethic of virtue and then translated into law, helps to expand the
thinking of a modern legal system's commitment to universality by
deepening discussions of what inclusion and equality actually mean
in a postcolonial country. Since uBuntu claims to have universal
purchase, its importance as a way of thinking about law and justice
is not limited to South Africa but becomes important in any human
rights discourse that is not limitedly rooted in Western European
ideals. Thus this book will be a crucial resource for anyone who is
seriously grappling with human rights, postcolonial
constitutionalism, and competing visions of the relations between
law and justice.