Social justice lawyering in post-apartheid South Africa: rules and ideals in everyday legal practice

Thesis

Law has been central to successive state-making projects in South Africa. Most recently, the 1996 Constitution was said to mark a “break” from apartheid and its “wicked” system of law, providing both the tools and moral vision to forge a transformed society. Yet, thirty-one years after apartheid’s end, racialised patterns of inequality and poverty persist. For socio-legal scholars, this coexistence of a progressive rights regime with deepening inequality represents a “paradox” (Mnisi-Weeks, 2021).

This thesis explores this paradox through a novel ethnographic analysis of lawyers who seek to advance social transformation in South Africa. Working within what I term the “access to justice (ATJ) legal field”, these lawyers provide clinical legal assistance to poor clients while pursuing strategic litigation aimed at broader systemic change. Their everyday work embodies the constitutional ideal of law as a means for both individual and societal improvement. Yet it also generates professional and moral dilemmas centred on tensions between a commitment to law as a system of rules; belief in law’s transformative moral potential; and self-conceptions as professionals who “help people.”

Drawing on the concepts of “legalism” (Dresch and Scheele, 2015) and “legal culture” (Chanock, 2001; Mnisi-Weeks, 2021), the thesis analyses how these lawyers navigate such tensions and how they are shaped by the conditions of legal practice itself. This reveals a fundamental dynamic in South Africa’s project of law-based transformation: the struggle between lawyerly adherence to rules, at least partly anchored in the past; and the normative commitment to new legal ideals, oriented to remaking South Africa’s future. By examining this dynamic ethnographically, the thesis develops a grounded account of contemporary professional legal culture in the ATJ field. It argues that this culture – shaped by how lawyers negotiate rules and ideals – is central to understanding the possibilities and limits of law-based social change.

Authors: Strelitz, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aqqzdban8
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: access to justice; law and social change; legal mobilisation; legalism; legal culture; transformative constitutionalism; cause lawyers; South Africa
• Subjects: Socio-legal studies; Legal anthropology; Development studies