Health, Social Movements, and Rights-based Litigation in South Africa

This article investigates the impact of rights-based litigation on social struggles in the South African health sector. It considers the manner in which individuals and social movements have utilized rights and the legal process in their efforts to dismantle the ill-health/poverty cycle, in the particular context of the struggle for universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS. Relying on literature concerning the transformative potential of socio-economic rights litigation and on examples from South African case law, the article critically evaluates the gains that have been made and the obstacles that have been encountered in this context. It argues that rights-based litigation presents a powerful tool in the struggle against poverty, but also elaborates on structural and institutional hurdles that continue to inhibit the effectiveness of rights-based strategies in this regard.     

The Judiciary, the Environmental Right and the Quest for Sustainability in South Africa: A Critical Reflection

The 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa explicitly provides for a comprehensive environmental right. The environmental right is part of the supreme law of the country and the entire environmental law regime. South Africa also has a vigilant judiciary, which has had various opportunities to interpret and give meaning to the environmental right. This article explores the manner in which the environmental right has been interpreted, translated and applied by the judiciary over the past 10 years. The article briefly analyses the environmental right, investigates recent judgments that reflected on the right, and concludes with a critical survey and suggestions as to future developments in this regard.     

Reluctant Radicals: How Moderates Shape Movements for Social Change

This essay reviews three books within the southern history literature on the white moderate's response to the civil rights movement; Kevin Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), Matthew Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006), and Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (2006). I examine how white moderates impacted the struggle for African American civil rights, and explore how this dynamic can help us understand the trajectory of the current debate over gay rights in the United States. I argue that while the US public ultimately came to support equal rights for African Americans, and has grown more tolerant of gay rights recently, they have been willing to do so only when these rights claims are framed as benefiting “deserving” segments of these populations. This shows that rights are, to some extent, contingent resources, available primarily to those citizens who fit certain ideal types, and suggests that those individuals who are unwilling (or unable) to live up to this ideal may ultimately fail to benefit from these movements.     

Sympathetic Symbols,Social Movements,and School Desegregation

An important theoretical contribution to the study of social movements involving legal mobilization is framing theory. Framing encourages an analysis of the parties involved and the tools used to make meaning of their cause. A scholarly gap emerges, however, when considering the race, gender, and class of the litigants and the social challenges they face. In this article, the author blends framing theory with controlling‐images theory to provide a conceptual tool of ‘the sympathetic symbol’ to analyse the effects of race, gender, and class. Next, the author introduces the legal and social histories of two school desegregation cases involving Chinese‐American and Mexican‐American plaintiffs, identifying the relevant controlling images germane to each case. Finally, the author questions whether a sympathetic symbol is necessary to counter the raced, gendered, and classed stereotypes that threaten the struggle for equality and suggests future directions for research.     

Social Protest and the Absence of Legalistic Discourse: In the Quest for New Language of Dissent

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our findings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our findings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic stratification along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.     

Law in South Africa and the Legitimacy Crisis

South Africa is presently confronting the possibility of a fundamental change in its political structure. In this context it is useful to consider the special character of the South African legal system and its role in the on-going legitimacy crisis in that country. This article attempts to delineate some of the principal dimensions of law and the types of legitimation issues in South Africa. It suggests that students of law and criminal justice have much to learn from the study of the South African case.     

Law in and Legitimacy South Africa

Israel has since 1967 administered the West Bank and Gaza Strip through highly legalistic and strongly repressive military governments. Has advocacy in Israeli courts on behalf of Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Ship has kgitimaed, and thus helped to perpetuate, ongoing Israeli military occupation of those regions? By examining legitimation in lawyering under lsraeli occupation, insight can be gained into the factors and their relative weights that lawyers facing harsh or repressive regimes must consider in balancing the costs and benefits of litigation to serve a social or political opposition movement. The author concludes that the benefits outweigh the legitimating effects of lawyers’work and that, on balance, Palestinians’election to seek representation in Israeli courts, and lawyers’choice to assist them, has been justified.     

Social Movements and Social-Change Litigation: Synergy in the Montgomery Bus Protest

Two competing schools of thought have emerged to explain how the Montgomery bus protest of 1955–56 brought about changes on the city's Jim Crow buses. The dominant explanation attributes the changes to the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery Improvement Association. A second interpretation emphasizes the critical role of the Supreme Court's decision striking down the state and local bus segregation laws. This essay prooides a third explanation: that these two strategies–the boycott and the litigation–interacted, each shaping and reinforcing the other. Each strategy war a critical part of the struggle, but neither brought change by itself. This essay argues that the two strategies of the Montgomery protest created a synergy that was the key to bringing about changes on the buses.     

Post-nationalism and the Quest for Constitutional Substitutes

Post-nationalism is suggestive of a number of transformations in the practice of both law and politics. In the case of politics, it implies an assertion of the salience of the organization of scale, time, and individual subjectivity in the practice of politics, yet a corresponding acknowledgement that traditional administrative structures have lost their hegemony over organization of these phenomena. In the case of law, it implies a legal pluralism caused in part by administrative differentiation, but also brought about an increase in the number and types of organization that have private 'law-making' capacities. These processes are particular disruptive for the modern constitution, which has traditionally been identified as a central instrument in the recognition, co-ordination, interaction, and self-legitimation of law and politics. This begs the question as to what processes are carrying out tasks that have traditionally been associated with the modern constitution. This essay argues that the fluidity and complexity of these processes entail that they must lie in the processes of interaction themselves. In particular, it argues that the central 'constitutional substitute' is the individual act of recognizing organizations as having political and legal attributes. For the process of recognition contains two structures which serve to organize and legitimize interaction. Any act of 'constitutional' recognition requires, first, a process of prior evaluation on the part of the observer that requires the organization to justify itself to the observer. The according of recognition, by contrast, entails that the observer respect the organization as having the autonomy to impose and represent itself politically. This respect allow the organization to order legal and political life.     

Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa

Provides a review of Gibson’s (2004) evaluation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. Offers a background to the TRC process then reckons with Gibson’s study in terms of his procedures, the context, the issue of “race”, the truth claims of the TRC, a digression on amnesty, and finally the link between truth and reconciliation. Concludes that this study offers substantial support for the TRC process. A review of James L. Gibson (2004) Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cape Town: HSRC Press, pp. 467.     

The Radicalization of Democracy: Conflict,Social Movements and Terrorism

The idea of democracy is being championed across the world, with some fifty new countries embracing this type of political system between 1974 and 2011 (Freedom House Anxious dictators, wavering democracies: global freedom under pressure, Freedom House, Washington, 2016). Simultaneously, however, dissatisfaction has grown due to the perceived incapacity of democracy to deal with collective problems, hence the necessity to reconfigure it and redraw some of its principles. This paper links the analysis of the recent evolution of democratic systems with the trajectory of socio-political conflicts and the changing features of contemporary terrorism. It examines, therefore, two intertwined phenomena, namely the radicalization of democracy and the radicalization of the other. It concludes by stressing that encouraging dissent and heeding contentious claims made by social movements may be one way of mitigating both types of radicalization. Embedded in the tradition of critical criminology, this paper attempts to demonstrate that only by outflanking conventional categories of analysis can the criminological community aspire to grasp such thorny contemporary phenomena.