Last week Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane suffered another legal defeat when a full bench of the Western Cape High Court dismissed her application for an interim interdict that would have prohibited the Speaker of the National Assembly from proceeding with the process to consider her removal from office. The outcome was to be expected, given the eccentricity of many of the legal (and not so legal) arguments advanced on her behalf. But maybe these arguments were never advanced to win a legal victory, but rather to promote political talking points.
You can read a court judgment in many distinct ways, or, put differently, you can look for many different things when reading such a judgment. You can read a court judgment like you read a detective novel: to find out what happened, and who the “good” guys and the “bad” guys are. (In some cases there are no “good” guys, and you are stuck with the “bad” guys and the “even worse” guys.) (more…)
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8 October 2020
Gauteng’s anti-immigrant Bill and the problem of reinforcing societal prejudice
Last week the Gauteng Member of the Executive Council (MEC) responsible for Economic Development, Environment, Agriculture and Rural Development published […]
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29 September 2020
Zondo recusal application: more a political than a legal move
Earlier this week former President Jacob Zuma’s legal team sent a letter to the State Capture Commission, indicating that they […]
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23 September 2020
Toshan Panday and the many ways implicated people evade accountability
Last week the KwaZulu-Natal High Court dealt another blow to Toshan Panday’s attempts to avoid prosecution for corruption. It is […]
Quote of the week
The law, like the suburban American house, is designed to order a particular pattern of relationships, many of them oriented around the heterosexual nuclear family. For real people in contemporary circumstances to inhabit the house the law built, one has to find side doors and discreet corners, while the dominant space changes little and the façade remains unaltered. The two big L.G.B.T.-rights Supreme Court victories that came before Bostock—Windsor and Obergefell—did exactly that: they carved out a place for monogamous same-sex couples who want to marry (statistically, these are more apt to be white middle-class people like the plaintiffs) in the house of the American nuclear family.
The New Yorker