UBUNTU AND THE LAW, African ideals and postapartheid jurisprudence

xii + 466pp., hardback, d.w., Fordham University Press, New York, 2012

Taken from the dust wrapper: 

This is the first comprehensive casebook to address the relationship of ubuntu to law. It also provides the most important critical articles on the use of ubuntu, both by the Constitutional Court and by other levels of the judiciary in South Africa. 

Although ubuntu is an ideal or value rooted in South Africa, its purchase as a performative ethic of the human goes beyond its roots in African languages. Indeed, this casebook helps break through some of the stale antinomies in the discussions of cultures and rights, because both of the courts and the critical essays discuss ubuntu as not simply an indigenous or even African ideal but as one that in its own terms calls for universal justification. The efforts of the Constitutional Court to take seriously competing ideals of law and justice have led to original ethical reasoning, which has significant implications for post-apartheid constitutionalism and law more generally....