Posted inNews/Politics

What the frack?

The word gives me the creeps. Starting with its eerie “fr” alliteration (like the hiss of a dangerous beast), leading through to its flat “a”, which sounds like something is stuck in your throat, ending in a hideous “ck” sound as if trying to spit out, but something is in the way, blocking the deposit […]

Posted inNews/Politics

Notes on the revolution

It is intriguing that in the debates surrounding the ongoing revolutions in the Arab world, commentators have by and large ignored one of the most controversial post-war works on revolution: Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution published in 1963. Arendt opens the book stating that wars and revolutions determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century and constituted […]

Posted inGeneral

Postmodernism and legal education

In 1997 a man by the name of Dennis Arrow published an assemblage of more than 200 pages of text in the Michigan Law Review under the title “Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak and Constitutional ‘Meaning’ for the Uninitiated”. Although the text claimed to be defining postmodernism and legal postmodernist jargon, it did everything but that. Instead, […]

Posted inNews/Politics

What is ideology?

The recent press coverage of my colleague, professor Pierre de Vos’s critique of a speech by advocate Jeremy Gauntlett, made me think about the question of ideology again. In his critique, De Vos writes: “For me what would be interesting and worthwhile would be to have a conversation (or even a heated argument) about the […]

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Living reconciliation II

In the latter half of 2006 former chief justice Pius Langa delivered an address titled “Transformative Constitutionalism” at the University of Stellenbosch law faculty. In this address he described a link between transformation and reconciliation, stating: “Transformation is not something that occurs only in courtrooms, parliaments and governmental departments. Social transformation is indispensable to our […]

Posted inGeneral

Living reconciliation

“The face of the other: Human dialogue at Solms Delta and the meaning of moral imagination” was the title of Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Cape Town on November 11 2010. Gobodo-Madikizela is best known for her book A human being died that night: a story of forgiveness, in which […]