The Making Of South African Legal Culture 1902 1936

Martin Chanock's illuminating and definitive perspective on that development examines all areas of the law including criminal law and criminology; the Roman-Dutch law; the State's African law; and land, labour and 'rule of law' questions.

Focusing on South Africa during the period 1650–2000, this book examines the role of law in making democracy work in changing societies. The Legacies of Law sheds light on the neglected relationship between path dependence and the law. Meierhenrich argues that legal norms and institutions, even illiberal ones, have an important - and hitherto undertheorized - structuring effect on democratic outcomes. Under certain conditions, law appears to reduce uncertainty in democratization by invoking common cultural backgrounds and experiences. In instances where interacting adversaries share qua law reasonably convergent mental models, transitions from authoritarian rule are shown to be less intractable. Meierhenrich's historical analysis of the evolution of law - and its effects - in South Africa during the period 1650–2000, compared with a short study of Chile from 1830–1990, shows how, and when, legal norms and institutions serve as historical causes to both liberal and illiberal rule.

This examination of the mixed jurisdiction experience makes use of an innovative cross-comparative methodology to provide a wealth of detail on each of the nine countries studied. It identifies the deep resemblances and salient traits of this legal family and the broad analytical overview highlights the family links while providing a detailed individual treatment of each country which reveals their individual personalities. This updated second edition includes two new countries (Botswana and Malta) and the appendices explore all other mixed jurisdictions and contain a special report on Cameroon.

This book examines five hundred years of South African economic history.

Jonathan Klaaren blends legal and social history in this engaging account of early conceptions of South African citizenship. He argues that distinctively South African notions of citizenship and nationality come out of the period 1897 to 1937, through legislation and official practices employing the key concept of ‘prohibited immigrant’ and seeking to regulate the mobility of three population groups: African, Asian and European. Further, he makes the case that the regulation and administration of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, in particular, provided the basis for the vision and eventual reality of a unified, although structurally unequal, South African population. This book fits into the growing field of Mobility Studies, which seeks to understand and document the migration of people both within and across national borders, while exploring the origins of those borders. In addition to nationality and citizenship, it touches on African pass laws, the origins of the Public Protector, the scheme importing Chinese labour to the gold mines, the development of internal bureaucratic legality, and India-South Africa intra-imperial relations. With its attention to the role of law in state-building and its understanding of the central place of implementation and administrative law in migration policy, this book offers a distinctive focus on the relationship between migration and citizenship.

Based on the scholarship of a global team of diverse authors, this wide-ranging handbook surveys the history and current status of pro-women thought and activism over millennia. The book traces the complex history of feminism across the globe, presenting its many identities, its heated debates, its racism, discussion of religious belief and values, commitment to social change, and the struggles of women around the world for gender justice. Authors approach past understandings and today’s evolving sense of what feminism or womanism or gender justice are from multiple viewpoints. These perspectives are geographical to highlight commonalities and differences from region to region or nation to nation; they are also chronological suggesting change or continuity from the ancient world to our digital age. Across five parts, authors delve into topics such as colonialism, empire, the arts, labor activism, family, and displacement as the means to take the pulse of feminism from specific vantage points highlighting that there is no single feminist story but rather multiple portraits of a broad cast of activists and thinkers. Comprehensive and properly global, this is the ideal volume for students and scholars of women’s and gender history, women’s studies, social history, political movements and feminism.

For many nations, a key challenge is how to achieve sustainable development without a return to centralized planning. Using case studies from Greenland, Hawaii and northern Norway, this 2006 book examines whether 'bottom-up' systems such as customary law can play a critical role in achieving viable systems for managing natural resources. Customary law consists of underlying social norms that may become the acknowledged law of the land. The key to determining whether a custom constitutes customary law is whether the public acts as if the observance of the custom is legally obligated. While the use of customary law does not always produce sustainability, the study of customary methods of resource management can produce valuable insights into methods of managing resources in a sustainable way.

This unique Research Handbook maps the historical, theoretical, and methodological concepts in sociology of law, exploring the rich and complex nature of this area of research. It argues that sociology of law flourishes due to its strong capacity for interdisciplinary engagement and links to other scientific concepts, methodologies and research fields.