The First Years of the South African Constitutional Court
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper tracks the first years of the South African Constitutional Court. The author provides insight into the unusual two-stage process through which South Africa’s Constitution was developed, and explains the role that the Constitutional Court played in certifying the text of the final Constitution. The paper then describes the initial meetings of the new Constitutional Court. The Court thought it imperative to demonstrate to the people of South Africa that the values of the new Constitution were reflected in the manner in which the Court conducted its business. Thus, the Court’s early administrative decisions, from the question of how the justices would robe to the design of the courtroom, reflected the Constitutional Court’s commitment to the values of human dignity, equality, accountability and openness. Foreign jurisprudence featured prominently in the early judgments of the Constitutional Court. In particular, Canadian Charter jurisprudence significantly influenced the Court’s interpretation of South Africa’s Bill of Rights. The paper also discusses notable instances in which the Constitutional Court struck out in new directions. The author concludes that remarkable progress has been made in South Africa since the end of Apartheid. In its short life, the Constitutional Court has built a positive reputation that is recognized throughout the democratic world, particularly in the area of social and economic rights.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".