Academic

Michelman on the 2007 Term of the Constitutional Court of South Africa

By Lawrence Solum

Frank I. Michelman (Harvard Law School) has posted On the Uses of Interpretive 'Charity': Some Notes on Application, Avoidance, Equality, and Objective Unconstitutionality from the 2007 Term of the Constitutional Court of South Africa on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This essay will appear in volume 1 of Constitutional Court Review, a new South African annual devoted to discussion of the prior year's work of the Constitutional Court of that country. The essay undertakes close examination and analysis of two of the Court's 2007 decisions - and also engages with some recent Court-watching debates in South Africa - from a hybrid, insider/outsider perspective. A main focus is on problems and puzzles arising from the South African system's widely-noted commitment to exposing the country's law governing private legal relations (including common law) to thorough and continuing re-examination for harmoniousness with the Bill of Rights ("horizontal application"); and, further, from the combination of that commitment with the country's historic and continuing reliance on common-law revision (along with legislation) for law reform in the field of defining criminal conduct. Topics more-than-incidentally treated include retrospective/prospective of judicially declared "new" criminal law, the idea of objective unconstitutionality (a kind of "overbreadth" doctrine), sex discrimination under the Constitution, and the debate over judicial minimalism and interbranch relations

Michelman is one of the greats.  Highly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on September 05, 2008 (boomark / email).