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4 Chapter 1
authored CLoSA — has given Constitutional conversations its heft. For
readers looking for a deeper treatment of the topics canvassed in
Constitutional conversations, we reproduce, in a compact disk (CD)
found at the back of the book, the 8 full length CLoSA chapters upon
which the 8 lead essays draw.
The book also succeeds because of the structure of the conference
from which much of its content flows: the Constitutional Law of South
Africa Conference & Public Lecture Series. That three day, three
night indaba was, by design, grounded in a large number of the
existing chapters of Constitutional Law of South Africa, 2 nd Edition.
Eight of those often monograph length treatments have been chapters
reconstituted, abbreviated and often radically reconceived chapters
as the lead essays in this work. (Again, the 8 original full length
chapters can be found on the compact disk (CD) at the back of this
work.) However, neither the lead essays nor Constitutional Law of
South Africa (‘CLoSA’) provide the frission that gives this new work
life. That frission is created, in large part, by the conference’s
respondents. For those of us who have written lead chapters, it is fair
to say that our work has been enriched when we read others who offer
significantly different perspectives on the same phenomena. Such
perspectives have, in many instances, awakened the lead authors
from their dogmatic slumber. 4
Such an awakening is an unalloyed good. Constitutional lawyers in
South Africa cannot for a moment sit idly back and assume that the
Constitution and all our cherished political institutions provide easy
answers for the depredations of apartheid or the desolations of our
current political order. Whether we like the gloss a fellow academic
or jurist may place on the case law or not, that academic or jurist will
invariably remind us that the Final Constitution is but a way station,
a stop on a never-ending journey towards a more just political order. 5
2 The content of these conversations
2.1 The SA Constitution as the last great modernist project
The opening conversation concerns, appropriately, the role that the
legal academy plays in the interpretation of the constitutional text.
As this collection flows, in part, from a much larger work that
purports to cover all aspects of constitutional law, it is important to
know a little about the players in this initial exchange. One
4 For just such a perspective, see J van der Walt Law and Sacrifice (2006) and J van
der Walt ‘A Reply to Woolman and Botha on Limitations’ in S Woolman & M Bishop
(eds) Constitutional conversations (2008) Chapter 11.
5 Woolman (n 1 above) 32.