South Africa

Law and society scholarship in South Africa has a relatively long, if fragmented, history. Before 1990, broadly understood, it was largely confined to a few legal academics and some sociologists and revisionist historians. While the latter focused on reexamining the orthodox history of the apartheid state, legal academics considered the role of the judiciary and the use of the law to repress political opposition and shore up apartheid rule.

At the University of Cape Town, the Socio-legal Research Centre (on the family), the Institute of Criminology, and law faculty members conducted sociolegal research. At the University of the Witwatersrand, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies engaged in research on a broad range of human rights issues, including policing, vigilantism, and security laws. In a climate of intense political activity and the use of legal strategies to oppose apartheid, too little of this research found its way into academic texts; it is more likely found in research reports and occasional papers.

Since 1990, the democratization of South Africa has expanded interest and research in law and society. The work is generally limited to sociology and law, with some in anthropology, and it has tended to remain within disciplinary silos. An initiative since 2002 at the University of the Witwatersrand, the Wits Workshop on Law and Society, has encouraged scholars to talk across their disciplines and to engage in more interdisciplinary work.

The advent of constitutional democracy in 1994 brought an upsurge of human rights studies. This has generated academic work on the role of courts in new democracies, the transformative potential of rights, the role of litigation in social struggles, and the relationships among the constitution, the state, and social movements. South Africa's constitutionalization of social and economic rights has provided fertile ground for sociolegal research. In general, there is significant interest in the role of law and constitutional institutions in the pursuit of human rights and social justice.

Criminological work has expanded since 1994 with new work on policing and vigilantism, gangs, prisons, the criminal justice system, and crime and criminality. Feminist sociolegal work, almost nonexistent before 1990, has expanded, especially in relation to genderbased violence, customary law, family law, human rights, and equality. Straddling criminological and feminist work has been research into the criminal justice system and survivors of sexual assault. The impact of globalization on law and constitutions, as well as an interest in early legal history, is also apparent in the past decade.