From Judicial Transplants to Judicial Translations: Constitutional Courts in Southern Africa – A Comparative Review

The contemporary legal landscape in Southern Africa and its responsiveness to the challenges in the region can be explained in many ways. Part of the explanation has been the idea of legal transplants—which entails borrowing and adapting legal norms, and structures from different legal systems in order to resolve legal problems in the region. The end of apartheid and other rapid changes in the region—political, racial, economic and social—has directly placed the courts on the frontlines of human rights protection especially on socio-economic rights and other overarching concerns of law reform. The adoption of constitutional courts in some of the countries, and consequent judicial activist turn in the jurisprudence of courts in the region generally; has inserted the courts into the mainstream of policy deliberations. Thus, this paper claims that legal transplant per se does not explain the full reality of what is going on in the region—in terms of nomativization, transmission, adoption, and adaptation of legal ideas within the respective systems in the region. It further claims that a mesh of different understandings and approaches to legal comparison and development is more suitable as a method of studying pluralist complex systems as we see in the region. Hence, the notion of judicial translation—the judiciary forming the membrane, purveyor and capillary of legal transmission—as an essential lens through which we can better view and understand the legal evolution in the region. Taking the institution of courts – particularly constitutional courts—and examining their jurisprudence as epitomized in some of their decisions of finality—the work seeks to begin a meaningful deliberation about the role of courts in law, social change, and policy in the region. It is divided into three major parts for ease of discourse. It is hoped that this would be a fitting exordium into the more significant meaning of legal transplant through judicial intervention in otherwise predominantly policy questions in the Southern African region.