Welcome to the Department of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. As a department that is extensively involved with first-year students, it is our objective to make all students joining the faculty feel at home. We strive to make the transition from school to university study as smooth as possible and to lay a sound foundation upon which the student can build throughout their academic career. The department also works to create an intellectually vibrant space of rigorous and critical inquiry and robust debate on pressing legal, political, jurisprudential, and socio-economic challenges facing our society and world. As a collective of scholar-teachers, members of the department are committed to an understanding of legal education as an exercise in developing the capacity to think and act as an active, thoughtful, literate, democratically-minded, and publicly-oriented citizen. Of paramount importance in the modules and activities offered by the department is the broadening of students’ legal imagination and the cultivation of an ethical legal consciousness and conscience.

 

At the undergraduate level, the department offers the core foundational module of the LLB in the first year. JUR 110 and JUR 120 (Introduction to Law and Legal Skills) introduce students to the history, classification, sources, and basic concepts in the South African legal and constitutional order. A broad introduction to the law of obligations (contract and delict), criminal law and criminal procedure, civil procedure, and law of evidence is provided, together with an exploration of themes including the legal profession, courts and alternative dispute resolution, and access to justice is provided and will be built on in later modules within the LLB. The module also encompasses essential legal skills, including finding, citing, and studying sources of law, as well as critical reading and thinking, argument development and analysis, and writing. ROM 120 connects to JUR 110 and 120 by providing an introductory study of Roman law and the overall common law (Roman-Dutch and English law) and their relevance to the contemporary legal system. In the third year, the department offers the flagship legal philosophy module, JUR 310, in which students explore different schools of legal philosophy as well as select philosophical, historical, and sociological engagements with the law. In the fourth year, students are then also able to choose from three electives offered by the department, namely Law and Transformation (AMR 410), Advanced Jurisprudence (JUR 420), and CLW 420 (Law and the Community).

 

The underlying teaching approach and philosophy across all these modules involves an attention to the historical formation of South African law and society under colonial, imperial, and apartheid rule and the present post-1994 struggle to transform and undo the legacies and afterlives of colonial-apartheid. The need to positively improve society on all levels and to alter power relations, mindsets, value systems, and knowledge structures and to confront hierarchies of race, class, and gender is central to the themes and content studied in all Jurisprudence modules. We are committed to the development of both technically well-skilled and well-educated lawyers as well as morally and politically engaged citizens with a deep understanding of the histories, powers, literatures, and cultures that have constituted the world we live in. We encourage a deep transdisciplinary historical and global apprehension of the role, force, and limits of law in society. The relationships between law and justice, law and society, law and history, law and politics, law and identity, and law and language are foregrounded in the study of the South African legal system and in how we approach classical and critical texts in legal theory.

 

The research interests of members of the department reflect a diverse array of practical and theoretical themes: equality and anti-discrimination law, socio-legal approaches, human rights, property law theory, key jurisprudential topics in continental philosophy, philosophy of liberation, African history and philosophy, law and literature, critical race theory, feminist theory, critical legal and constitutional theory, transgender legal reform, race and class inequality, queer theory, law and technology/surveillance, and law and political economy. In one way or another, these themes are approached with the post-1994 South African social and historical context in mind and with a strong focus on examining and interrogating the gap between constitutional promise and constitutional reality.

 

The department boasts a proud history of advancing new vistas of critical legal thought and, more generally, defending the idea of the university as a space of contestation, debate, ideas, experimentation, and study. We trust that all students who pass through our hands will be stimulated, excited, and challenged to be part of the change they want to see in the world!