Falling Short of Constitutional Norms: Does ‘Normative (In)congruence’ Explain the Courts’ Inability to Promote the Right to Water in South Africa?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In South Africa, municipal non-compliance with legislation promoting the constitutional right to sufficient water is both a failure of the rule of law and a betrayal of that right. Judicial intervention has prompted formalistic compliance with water law, but the underlying commitment to sufficient water remains unfulfilled. Does the inability of courts to achieve social justice despite enforcing social legislation confirm the thesis that commitments to the rule of law and to social justice are inconsistent, that upholding the rule of law may not advance social justice? This article offers an alternative to this “inconsistency thesis”, arguing that the rule of law can accommodate social justice if it demands “normative congruence” alongside congruence with formal rules. Empirical investigation reveals that structural challenges and the multifarious normative demands on officials create a condition of “normative incongruence” that impedes the pursuit of social justice, even as courts compel congruence with formal rules.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".