, LJU4801 Assignment 2 (COMPLETE ANSWERS)
Semester 2 2025 - DUE September 2025; 100%
TRUSTED Complete, trusted solutions and
explanations.
Essay — Why S v Makwanyane embodies an
African legal-philosophical approach
Thesis. S v Makwanyane (Constitutional Court, 1995) can reasonably be
read not only as a landmark human-rights judgment that abolished
capital punishment in post-apartheid South Africa, but also as a ruling
that consciously grounds constitutional interpretation in an African
legal-philosophical orientation. The judgment does this by (1) explicitly
invoking ubuntu and communal conceptions of personhood, (2)
privileging restorative and reconciliatory aims of law over retributive
and cathartic functions, (3) adopting a values-based, purposive method
of interpretation consonant with transformative constitutionalism, and
(4) seeking legitimacy for the new basic law by rooting it in indigenous
normative resources. Together these features show the Court reaching
beyond Western liberal formalism toward a jurisprudence shaped by
African moral vocabularies and aims.
1. Context and stakes
The Constitutional Court decided Makwanyane in the fragile moment of
political transition from apartheid to democracy. The new Constitution
enshrined values such as human dignity, equality and freedom, and
required courts to interpret limitations on rights in light of the
Constitution’s founding values. Questions about the death penalty were
therefore not only technical constitutional adjudication but also
questions about what kind of polity South Africa would become.
Semester 2 2025 - DUE September 2025; 100%
TRUSTED Complete, trusted solutions and
explanations.
Essay — Why S v Makwanyane embodies an
African legal-philosophical approach
Thesis. S v Makwanyane (Constitutional Court, 1995) can reasonably be
read not only as a landmark human-rights judgment that abolished
capital punishment in post-apartheid South Africa, but also as a ruling
that consciously grounds constitutional interpretation in an African
legal-philosophical orientation. The judgment does this by (1) explicitly
invoking ubuntu and communal conceptions of personhood, (2)
privileging restorative and reconciliatory aims of law over retributive
and cathartic functions, (3) adopting a values-based, purposive method
of interpretation consonant with transformative constitutionalism, and
(4) seeking legitimacy for the new basic law by rooting it in indigenous
normative resources. Together these features show the Court reaching
beyond Western liberal formalism toward a jurisprudence shaped by
African moral vocabularies and aims.
1. Context and stakes
The Constitutional Court decided Makwanyane in the fragile moment of
political transition from apartheid to democracy. The new Constitution
enshrined values such as human dignity, equality and freedom, and
required courts to interpret limitations on rights in light of the
Constitution’s founding values. Questions about the death penalty were
therefore not only technical constitutional adjudication but also
questions about what kind of polity South Africa would become.
