The Post-Apartheid Constitutions: Perspectives on South Africa's Basic Law

Offering a unique range of perspectives on South Africa's interim and final constitutions, this collection of essays by scholars, lawyers, and political leaders illuminates the many issues of process, substance, and context presented by the constitutions. The essays included examine such questions as the extent of popular involvement in South Africa's exercise in constitution writing and the impact of political force, personal persuasion, and human transformation on the results. They address the constitution's human rights provisions with particular essays focusing on free speech, socioeconomic rights, women's rights and traditional authority, cultural rights, and the rights of noncitizens. The contributors also discuss the governmental structure that frames, and is framed by, the new constitutional order, examining institutions from the Constitutional Court to the criminal justice system.