The Emerging Role of ubuntu-botho in Developing a Consensual South African Legal Culture

Legal culture in apartheid South Africa has variously been described as conservative and positivist, with judicial deference to the executive and to parliamentary sovereignty; formalistic, technical and authoritarian; and ‘of reasoned argument’ and justification. Until 1994, law drew its legitimacy from the very fact that it was state sanctioned, and the material context or the social aftermath of the application of a rule was in many instances deemed irrelevant. However, the adoption, first, of the interim Constitution, and later the final Constitution, saw a desire to transform this legal culture. The Constitution is now more than a formal document regulating public power: it also embodies a normative value system in terms of which judges are called upon to interpret laws and their application