Quote of the week
Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
On the pardon power of the President
The mercy power also triggers philosophical reflection. Any discussion of the mercy power must rest on the fundamental tension between a conception of clemency as a rarely used “act of grace” within the sole discretion of an executive, or a routine, rule-bound process, publicly transparent and amenable to judicial review. Max Weber’s distinction between legitimate charismatic authority and bureaucracy may be relevant here: is a grant of clemency a form of charisma, an other-worldly power outside the
rational world of legal rules, or a routine administrative decision that is repetitive, subject to explicit criteria, and consistent?
