The Conundrum of Two Fellows in The Same Ship: A Comparative Legal Analysis of The Duplicity of Damages in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract South African law recognizes the common law right of the plaintiff to institute a claim for damages arising from loss caused by the delictual conduct of the defendant. In addition to the claim for common law damages for pain and suffering, insult, shock, past and future medical expenses, and loss of enjoyment of the amenities of life, depending on the nature of the delict, the plaintiff also has the right to claim constitutional damages for the infringement of constitutional rights. On that score, the South African Constitution, 1996 empowers the courts to ‘grant appropriate relief’ and to make ‘just and equitable’ orders in the context of common law and constitutional damages. This has resulted in the duplicity of damages in our law without clear guidance on how these two delictual “fellows” should interact in practical scenarios. Further, the courts have dragged their feet when it comes to the application of constitutional damages largely due to their orthodox approach which militates against the development of constitutional damages in South Africa. This article proposes avenues which enable the courts to take a coordinated approach in the application of these two remedies. It argues that in determining quantum for damages, the court should take a functional and pragmatic approach which is based on the ethos of fairness and equity over and above common law tenets.
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 | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 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".