Entrenchment by Interpretation: Section 25 of the South African Constitution and the Failure of Socio-Economic Redress
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66502/hdtc9308Keywords:
Transformative constitutionalism, Land restitution, Constitutional property, Socio-economic redressAbstract
This article examines a paradox in South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional order: a Constitution drafted to dismantle racial dispossession has become a principal legal framework through which the holdings that dispossession generated are secured. Although the 1996 Constitution is widely regarded as among the world’s most progressive, the property clause in section 25 and the doctrinal architecture built around it have narrowed the state’s practical capacity to effect structural socio-economic change. The article argues that this outcome is not the product of judicial partiality toward landowners, which the case law does not support, but the cumulative effect of four mechanisms: an expropriation doctrine organised around state acquisition rather than distributive effect; a compensation practice anchored in market value despite the multi-factor standard in section 25(3); a division of constitutional labour under which tenure security and housing are justiciable while ownership remains outside redistribution; and an adjudicative method in which the historical provenance of title, though available as an interpretive consideration and listed among the compensation factors, is an element of no operative test. The study applies doctrinal legal analysis within a socio-legal frame, reading five leading Constitutional Court decisions against transformative constitutionalism and critical legal studies. It finds that entrenchment operates through interpretation and institutional design rather than through constitutional text, which relocates the object of reform: were the barrier textual, amendment would suffice. The article contributes to debates on transformative constitutionalism by specifying, at the level of doctrine, how a redistributive constitutional mandate is neutralised without ever being formally denied.
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