How South Africa shaped a world-leading constitution - As part of the 40th anniversary of the Canon Collins Trust, Justice Mavedzenge spoke to Albie Sachs about the legacy of apartheid-era legal activism for Southern Africa
, who, during the eighties, stood up against legal oppression in the courts. They created a culture of visionary legal activism which made it possible to start imagining a new legal system where the courts would be used not to oppress the people, but to defend their fundamental rights.
One by one other judges also came to that position. That’s when we developed the theory of the purposive interpretation of the constitution. From then onwards, the approach our court applied was to search for the purposes of the constitution, to look to the preamble, look to the whole spirit of the foundational principles and the Bill of Rights, and to set the issues in their historical context.
The late US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg some years ago commissioned a survey on the most cited top courts in the world. The survey found that the South African Constitutional Court was the second most cited court globally, with only the Canadian Supreme Court getting more mentions.
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