Comparative Constitutional Law: South Africa's Bill of Rights
Spring term, Block A
M,T 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Professor Frank Michelman
3 classroom credits LAW-32465A Spring
This course will examine constitutional developments in South Africa, including and following upon that country's transition to a constitutional state in 1994. It will focus mainly on adjudications under the Bill of Rights and the bearing of those adjudications on the wider development of South African law and legal (especially judicial) institutions. Comparison with constitutional law in other countries, for which we will rely heavily on the South African Constitutional Court's own extensive references to foreign law, will be an important theme. The course will consider the range of possible motivations for consultations of foreign law by constitutional courts and legal scholars, and the values and purposes that such consultations may be thought to serve. Topics will include protections of civil liberties, economic and social rights, equality and affirmative action, and the bearing of the Bill of Rights on law governing relations to which the government is not a party (the "state action" question). Students must have completed, or be taking simultaneously, a basic course in the constitutional law of some country.