African Customary Marriages in South Africa and the Intricacies of a Mixed Legal System: Judicial (In)novatio or Confusio?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
South Africa has a mixed legal system comprised of transplanted European laws (the core being Roman-Dutch law, subsequently influenced by English common law) and indigenous laws, referred to as customary law. This mix is also evident in South Africa’s marriage laws, which can roughly be divided into two categories: civil marriages or unions, and African customary marriages. Since 1994, the developments in these two categories of marriage have been revolutionary. The case law reads like a jurisprudential chronicle of factual situations never contemplated by the legislator, and the judiciary must resort to innovation to solve the intricacies of a constitutionalized mixed legal system. To deal with the challenges posed by the interaction of two seemingly equal legal systems in one legal sphere, the courts have followed a variety of approaches including legal positivism, the application of common law principles, and, more recently, the notion of transformative constitutionalism. The primary aim of this essay is to discuss the sometimes innovative and at other times confusing approaches followed by the judiciary in dealing with the complexities created by a mixed legal system, especially with regard to marriages between Africans.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".