Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Law and society and socio-legal research'

The United States is among one of the only democratic industrialized nations in the world that does not provide guaranteed access to civil representation in cases involving basic human need. This leaves indigent litigants who are at risk of losing their homes or their children left to seek counsel through insufficient pro-bono programs or limited scope legal self-help centers. This thesis provides a history of the struggle for the right to civil counsel, known as Civil Gideon, and explores a variety of proposed solutions to bridge the justice gap for indigent litigants. Despite considerable support for Civil Gideon among scholars and the legal community, the public is unaware of the justice gap- about 80% of Americans assume the right to civil counsel already exists. This thesis conducted two studies to understand possible reasons for this gap between public knowledge and reality and to identify the possibility of manipulating public knowledge through exposure to injustices. The findings from these studies are used to inform a network approach to shape public support for Civil Gideon so that the US court system can truly represent opportunity and equality for all citizens.

This dissertation explores how domestic workers within the Cape Town area access childcare. From this exploration, the argument that the state should provide childcare to mothers as a redress measure under s9(2) is developed. This argument is drawn from the proposition that universal access to childcare has the potential to reduce gender inequality by removing the care burden that women bear. By providing universal access to childcare, and thereby removing or reducing the care burden, women are better empowered to access income earning activity. This qualitative enquiry utilises a literature review and one-on-one interviews as modes of data collection. Eight interviews were conducted on the experiences of domestic workers. A feminist methodology was adopted in the collection and analysis of the data, which led to the finding that greater state intervention is needed into the lives of domestic workers so that they may realise substantive equality. This Constitutionally based legal analysis is used as a means of understanding social transformation through the experiences of the participant group.

This study examines the role of law in the constitution and contestation of state power in African history. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, it analyses legal struggles between Africans and the state, and amongst Africans themselves between 1950 and 1990. In doing so it intervenes in a number of scholarly debates on the relationship between law, state power and agency in African history. Firstly, I examine the role of law in constituting state power by exploring the interplay between legitimation and coercion in long term perspective. Secondly, I interrogate legal centralism as an approach to understanding developments in the legal sphere in African history and make the case for legal pluralism as a more appropriate approach. I argue that during the period under study, Zimbabwe witnessed a process of evolving legal pluralism characterised by the mutual appropriation of forms, symbols and concepts between state law and the ‘customary law’. Thirdly, I contribute to the debate on African legal agency by demonstrating that its significance went beyond the utility of the law in specific social, economic and political struggles. I argue that it also gave expression to emergent political imaginaries, shifting ideas of personhood and alternative visions of the social and political order. Lastly, I argue that, by undertaking a historical examination of legal struggles, this study provides a useful foundation from which to analyse contemporary legal struggles in Zimbabwe and in Africa more generally. The findings presented here caution against being drawn in by the apparent novelty of contemporary legal struggles. In addition, they suggest the means by which human rights discourse in Africa might be reinvigorated.

This qualitative socio-legal study critically examined the protection against housing discrimination found in chapter 2 § 12 of the Swedish Discrimination Act (SFS 2008:567), in light of United Nations, Council of Europe and European Union housing and non-discrimination (human rights) standards. As an applied socio-legal study it aimed to be critical towards the limits of law in context. By applying an intersectional approach as the theoretical framework for the study, it aimed to identify legal weaknesses from an intersectional point of view. The study made use of a descriptive doctrinal analysis method and a critical text analysis method. The material for analysis consisted of civil housing discrimination law: legislation, preparatory works and case law. The case law, anonymized for this study, consisted of three district court judgments and three appeal court judgments processed during the years 2007-2016. The first research question asked what, if any, forms of intersectional discrimination the housing discrimination law face and comprise. The descriptive doctrinal analysis revealed that all cases shared the discrimination ground ‘ethnicity’ and discrimination form ‘direct discrimination’. The critical text analysis resulted in three themes illustrating intersectional discriminating facing the law: “aggressive men” (the intersection of sex and ethnicity), “resourceless women” (the intersection of sex, socio-economic class and ethnicity) and “unsettled strangers” (the intersection of socio-economic class and ethnicity). The second research question asked what, if any, the limits of law are from an intersectional point of view. By discussing the three themes in relation to the legal landscape and previous research it was possible to identify several limits of law relating to intersectionality, such as the exhaustive list of discrimination grounds, absent discrimination grounds and an absence of intersectional awareness. The study concluded that Swedish housing discrimination law rely on formal equality, which renders intersectional discrimination invisible and the power of housing human rights disputable.

The rapidly evolving biosciences increasingly rely on the analysis, manipulation and reproduction of the human body. In the health setting, novel biotechnologies offer new methods/avenues for the investigation of wellbeing and the treatment of illness, but they do not just expand the clinician’s toolbox, they increase the very scope of her work. By offering new (and formerly invisible) measures for health, they have created new categories of illhealth (ie: expanding the ways in which humans can be classified as abnormal, unhealthy, or diseased). In doing so, they contain huge marginalising potential. And they are evolving at a pace that the law cannot match. Given this, important questions arise such as: What institutions are acting in this field and what is guiding them? How is health-related research being encouraged and regulated? How does the human subject figure in the bioeconomy? What values are we claiming and vindicating under existing regulatory regimes? What values ought we be emphasising bearing in mind social needs and individual rights? The body of work that forms this submission represents five years of socio-legal research and evolving thought on the topic of how values inform the law and are operationalised through the law and legal institutions. While the publications relied on are diverse, they all pursue small facets of this value inquiry. The first theme addressed – international values and actors – is composed of three papers which explore broad internationally shared values claimed in legal instruments such as the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, and institutions such as UNESCO and the EPO. A range of values emerge from these. Papers under the second theme – human participation in health research – explore how we access and use the human body in the modern biosociety/bioeconomy, and how we might better encourage subject participation in, and equitable benefit from, the biomedical research setting. Focusing on population biobanking, it assesses who has rights in the body and what those rights are, and how the existing environment interacts with our claimed values. Papers under the third theme – encouraging stem cell research in Argentina – explore governance instruments and their significance for realising claimed or desired values. These papers are informed by original empirical work conducted in Argentina over a 24-month period during which the Argentine government grappled with the realities of the new biosociety and the (perceived) need to facilitate bioscience research and medical treatment using human tissue. While these papers represent only part of the scholarship deriving from this project, they deploy new evidence on the existing environment and the way forward in that jurisdiction. As argued in the Critical Review, these publications form a broadly coherent and farranging body of interdisciplinary work which persistently questions the link between law and values and how we govern modern bioscience. While there are necessarily descriptive elements, the whole is critically analytical and normatively suggestive. In addition to summarising the aims, objectives, methodology, results and conclusions of these works, and indicating how they form a coherent body of work, the Critical Review goes further. Drawing on evolving thinking and recent scholarship, it argues for a regime less reliant on instruments and more reliant on expert institutions informed by, and charged with protecting, socio-moral values informed by the human rights paradigm.

Background: The point of departure for this study is that people with immigrant backgrounds are discriminated in the Swedish labour market and they are discriminated on several grounds. Discrimination is violation against human rights and it affects gender equality and integration policy negatively. Different studies show that immigrants hold the jobs which are lowest paid and not preferred by the swedes. The studies show also that immigrants from Africa and middle east are those who are discriminated most. This discrimination occurs despite the Swedish clear anti-discrimination policy and its regional and international obligations to combat discrimination. The Swedish discriminations act prohibits discrimination on the seven grounds mentioned in the act. This thesis analyses the Swedish discriminations act, its implementation and efficacy. It sheds some light on Sweden’s regional and international obligations in this regard. Finally, the impact of discrimination against immigrants on Swedish gender equality and integrations policy is discussed. Purpose: The purposes of this thesis are, based on the earlier studies, to highlight the ways in which immigrants are discriminated in the Swedish labour market and contributing to the improvement of the anti-discrimination policy in a long run. To accomplish this task, I have Scrutinized and analysed the efficacy of the Swedish discrimination policy, based on earlier studies, I have analysed different ways in which immigrants are discriminated in the Swedish labour market and discussed the impact of immigration on gender equality and integrations policy. Method: For conducting this research, qualitative method has been used. For accomplishing this study, both primary sources such as legal documents and legislations and secondary sources such as books, article, newspapers and internet websites have been used. To achieve this task, I have used intersectional analysis, and this is because immigrants are discriminated on multiple grounds and intersectional perspective is the best perspective in analysing such grounds. Conclusion: Based on earlier studies, the idea that people with immigrant background are discriminated in Swedish labour market is supported. They are discriminated in different ways such as recruitment process, in salaries, working conditions and promotion process. Discrimination can be due to different reasons and based on different grounds. According to the studies, though discrimination affects immigrants in general, immigrants from Middle east and Africa most discriminated. The same studies show that Muslim women who can be identified as Muslims due to headscarves, burqa or niqab are discriminated most and the face harassment in the public areas. Additional findings in this thesis are that discrimination in general is obstacle to gender equality and integrations policy given that it widens the already wide gap between women and men as well as between immigrants and swedes. Besides this, discrimination in the criminal system also leads to discrimination in the labour market. This is because prejudices based on the reports of biased police, judges, prosecutors etc. lead to discrimination against immigrants by relating them to crime. Therefore, though it is not deeply studied, there is a significant correlation between discrimination in the criminal legal system and discrimination in the labour market.

This thesis explores the ways in which Islamic law and human rights interact within the work of women’s rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that advocate the reform of the Egyptian Personal Status Law (PSL) in the period between 2006 and 2010. The thesis shows the relevance of the human rights framework as well as the flexibility of Islamic legal discourse in the work of the NGOs. Drawing on both Islamic law and human rights enabled NGOs to develop a more gender-sensitive religious discourse, which supported their PSL reform demands. However the interaction between these two frameworks was largely affected by several important factors, which sometimes led NGOs to dilute some of their demands. These factors included the implications of the change in the form of Shari‘a as codified law under the modern nation-state; the Egyptian political context both internally and externally; the common local perception that human rights are a Western production and an extension of Western colonialism; the dominant religious but patriarchal discourse governing the PSL; the implications of activism through the NGO structure; and the personal religiosity of individual activists. The thesis explores NGOs’ PSL reform demands in depth bearing in mind these factors. It investigates NGOs’ discourse and shows its strengths and weaknesses. It shows that the interaction between Islamic law and human rights within NGOs’ work in this particular Egyptian context produced reform demands that were innovative and practically appealing on one hand, but epistemologically problematic in some instances, on another.

The contemporaneity has been famously defined as “the age of rights” (Bobbio 1995), and the logic of rights has become “the principal language that we use in public settings to discuss weighty questions of both right and wrong” (Glendon 1991, 63). If human rights give voice to minorities and marginalized groups in society, and they can do so with powerful legal and symbolical resources, the tendency to frame almost every social conflict in terms of a clash of rights also favours absolute formulations and the activation of judiciary.Under such premises, this dissertation provides a qualitative socio-legal analysis of the jurisprudence on sexual orientation of the European Court of Human Rights. More in detail, I focus on the arguments produced by the judges, and I analyze the legal controversies, the normative framing, the social perspectives, and the moral standpoints that orient the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. The aim is twofold; on one hand, I investigate how the aforementioned arguments influence the evaluation, the acceptance, or the refusal of claims grounded on sexual orientation. On the other, the purpose is to critically engage in the asserted neutral character of judicial reasoning, in order to reveal the clash of perspectives underpinned to the interpretation of human rights.

The thesis examines the expressions and origins of negative attitudes to gender equality in the Czech Republic, which have been noticeable especially in the process of implementation of the EU sex equality acquis. It asks whether and how they can be explained with reference to socio-legal developments that started during Czechoslovakia’s State Socialist past, but are still relevant today. In order to answer these research questions, the thesis examines how gender equality has been regulated through law and how it has been understood by law-makers, judges and legal scholars in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic during State Socialism (1948-1989) and Transition (1989-today). The thesis examines legal developments in gender-relevant areas, most importantly in antidiscrimination law. It also excavates the underlying, sometimes hidden, but crucial understandings of key concepts such as ‘women’, ‘gender’, ‘equality’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘rights’. The thesis argues that while formal legal guarantees for women have largely been satisfactory in the Czech Republic by international standards, the way these formal legal guarantees are understood, interpreted and applied has not been gender-progressive. It argues that the reasons for this are: (i) entrenched patriarchal ideas about women’s appropriate role both in private and public life; (ii) a failure to understand gender as a social construct and to recognize gender order as a pervasive social structure; (iii) an inadequate conceptualization of equality and a refusal to combat sex discrimination; and (iv) a limited understanding of the role of law and of rights in the shaping of social relations. It argues that these understandings have been considerably path-dependent on State Socialism, be it through a rejection of anything perceived as State Socialist (which has harmed redistributive policies), as well as through the mostly unconscious retention of ideas or their absence (which has led to a blindness to the cultural aspects of patriarchy).

A major objective of the Human Rights Act (HRA) was to bring about a culture of rights in the UK. Its introduction fore-grounded questions about the use of rights to advance social justice issues and was the impetus for this research. At about the same as the Act came into effect another law, Section 55, an antithesis of what the HRA promised, was passed which forced thousands of asylum-seekers into destitution. Section 55 became a major battleground pitting non-governmental organisations (NGOs) against the Home Office in a three-year long campaign, characterised by rancour and viciousness, unlike any in recent memory. The NGOs, with the new HRA as a key part of their strategy, defeated the legislation. This thesis, a bottom-up case study of rights at work, examines the role of rights in the campaign to assess (1) if rights brought about social changes and (2) is a culture of rights developing in the UK? The paper first considers the various theoretical frameworks on rights and social change and analyses various case studies of rights at work. Context is important; therefore, it also examines how asylum has come to be framed in present-day discourse, with an overview on the evolution of welfare as a coercive measure. The study, framed against current events of the day, concludes that while test-case challenges eventually defeated Section 55 welfare as a coercive measure continues. In short, the HRA has proven to be ineffective against illiberal policies and the development of a culture of rights, insofar as asylum is concerned, has stalled. And it has happened with deliberation by a government determined to be tough on asylum irrespective of the HRA.

The issue of the Islamic headscarf has been in the centre of the political debate whether it fits into the Western culture or not. Several member-states in the European Union have issued laws and regulations that impose restrictions on wearing the Islamic headscarf in the public sphere. Even some EU courts have ruled such restrictions imposed by member-states. Recently, this issue has been discussed in the context of the occupational life. In a dispute before the European Court of Justice, the ban was considered as legitimate. In this research, I analyse the judgment from a socio-legal perspective and analyse the intersectional identity of Mrs. Achbita who is a party in the dispute, considering that she belongs to the social category of veiled working Muslim women.

“Contested Childhoods” links together three major areas of historical inquiry: war and criminality, law and social change, and the law as it relates to children, in the first half of twentieth-century China. The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 has eclipsed the historical significance of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government and the importance of its role during the wartime period. This study examines how the outbreak of China’s War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945) served as a crucial catalyst to the construction of ideas of criminality and its relation to children during the wartime period. It examines the different measures by which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government (1928-1949) attempted to handle the rise in levels of criminality involving juveniles. The study analyses how an increase in criminality during the wartime period challenged how ideas on and about children and childhood were in understood within Chinese society. Moreover, it argues that wartime conditions served as a crucial catalyst prompted the construction of a new judicial and legal framework that was aimed at delineating the boundaries between childhood and adulthood during this period.

Although social policy was once perceived to be solely within the purview of the nation state, there has been a move toward a more European social policy. The European Court of Justice for the European Communities (‘Court of Justice’ or ‘Court’) determines the scope of European law and how it affects national welfare states. The court’s decisions will affect not only the national law of the member states with regard to social policy but also the direction of European social policy as it expands. However, the ECJ does not choose the policy areas in which it makes its decisions, but instead reacts to the preliminary references that are sent by the national courts of the Member States. These preliminary references from the Member States will set the Court’s agenda. Preliminary references are unevenly distributed across the Member States of the EU, and some Member States’ preliminary references are concentrated in particular policy areas. The jurisprudence of the Court, and consequently the social policy of the EU, could be steered by this uneven distribution. This thesis will answer the threshold question of why scholars of social policy should care about the Court of Justice, with a legal analysis of some key themes in the Court’s decisions in the area of social policy. It will then employ a mixed methods research design to explain the variation in rates of social policy preliminary references from the EU-15. First, a Time Series Cross-Section (TSCS) model will be used to test a series of hypotheses generated from the literature, and three novel hypotheses, in a dataset of social policy preliminary references from the EU-15 from 1996 to 2009. Next, a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Ragin 2000) will group the variables that were found to be significant into sets of conditions, or ‘causal pathways,’ that lead to higher and lower rates of social policy preliminary references. Finally, two qualitative case studies will be conducted, in the UK and France. Analysis of documentary evidence and 25 expert interviews in the two member states and at the Court of Justice will further explain and illuminate the differing usage of preliminary reference process. The analysis of the mixed methods is integrated in the final stage. Implications for the direction of EU law related to social policy and the future development of European social policy will be considered in the concluding chapter.

A critical investigation of the public/private distinction as it has been conceived in Anglo-American political thinking in the second half of the 20th century. A broadly held consensus has developed amongst many theorists that public/private does not refer to any single determinate distinction or relationship but rather to an often ambiguous range of related but analytically distinct conceptual oppositions. The argument of this thesis is that if we approach public/private in the search for analytic or conceptual clarity then this consensus is correct. Against this I propose that a number of the most dominant invocations of the distinction can be understood to express public/private as an irreducibly political dialectic that mediates the relationship between the subjective and objective side of social and political life. By locating these conceptually diverse invocations within a broader and more determinate framework of the historical development and contestation of the boundaries which establish the conditions for subjectivity, as the assertion of political agency, on the one hand, and which demarcate, police and defend these particular boundaries, as part of the objectively given character of social life and institutional organisation, on the other hand, then a more determinate character to public/private can be recognized. I then seek to explore the capacity of this model to capture and explain the peculiar post-war problematisation of public/private amongst a number of new left thinkers in Britain and America.

Diese Arbeit bietet eine solide theoretische Grundlage zu Philanthropie und religiös motivierten Spendenaktivitäten und deren Einfluss auf Wohltätigkeitstrends, Entwicklungszusammenarbeit und einer auf dem Gedanken der sozialen Gerechtigkeit beruhenden Philanthropie. Untersucht werden dafür die Strukturen religiös motivierte Spenden, für die in der islamischen Tradition die Begriffe „zakat“, „Waqf“ oder im Plural auch „awqaf-“ oder „Sadaqa“ verwendet werden, der christliche Begriff dafür lautet „tithes“ oder „ushour“. Aufbauend auf diesem theoretischen Rahmenwerk analysiert die qualitative und quantitative Feldstudie auf nationaler Ebene, wie die ägyptische Öffentlichkeit Philanthropie, soziale Gerechtigkeit, Menschenrechte, Spenden, Freiwilligenarbeit und andere Konzepte des zivilgesellschaftlichen Engagements wahrnimmt. Um eine umfassende und repräsentative Datengrundlage zu erhalten, wurden 2000 Haushalte, 200 zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen erfasst, sowie Spender, Empfänger, religiöse Wohltäter und andere Akteure interviewt. Die so gewonnen Erkenntnisse lassen aussagekräftige Aufschlüsse über philanthropische Trends zu. Erstmals wird so auch eine finanzielle Einschätzung und Bewertung der Aktivitäten im lokalen Wohltätigkeitsbereich möglich, die sich auf mehr als eine Billion US-Dollar beziffern lassen. Die Erhebung weist nach, dass gemessen an den Pro-Kopf-Aufwendungen die privaten Spendenaktivitäten weitaus wichtiger sind als auswärtige wirtschaftliche Hilfe für Ägypten. Das wiederum lässt Rückschlüsse zu, welche Bedeutung lokale Wohltätigkeit erlangen kann, wenn sie richtig gesteuert wird und nicht wie bislang oft im Teufelskreis von ad-hoc-Spenden oder Hilfen von Privatperson an Privatperson gefangen ist. Die Studie stellt außerdem eine Verbindung her zwischen lokalen Wohltätigkeits-Mechanismen, die meist auf religiösen und kulturellen Werten beruhen, und modernen Strukturen, wie etwa Gemeinde-Stiftungen oder Gemeinde-„waqf“, innerhalb derer die Spenden eine nachhaltige Veränderung bewirken können. Daher bietet diese Arbeit also eine umfassende wissenschaftliche Grundlage, die nicht nur ein besseres Verständnis, sondern auch den nachhaltiger Aus- und Aufbau lokaler Wohltätigkeitsstrukturen in Ägypten ermöglicht. Zentral ist dabei vor allem die Rolle lokaler, individueller Spenden, die beispielsweise für Stiftungen auf der Gemeindeebene eingesetzt, wesentlich zu einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung beitragen könnten – und das nicht nur in Ägypten, sondern in der gesamten arabischen Region. Als konkretes Ergebnis dieser Arbeit, wurde ein innovatives Modell entwickelt, dass neben den wissenschaftlichen Daten das Konzept der „waqf“ berücksichtigt. Der Wissenschaftlerin und einem engagierten Vorstand ist es auf dieser Grundlage gelungen, die Waqfeyat al Maadi Community Foundation (WMCF) zu gründen, die nicht nur ein Modell für eine Bürgerstiftung ist, sondern auch das tradierte Konzept der „waqf“ als praktikable und verbürgte Wohlstätigkeitsstruktur sinnvoll weiterentwickelt.
This work provides a solid theoretical base on philanthropy, religious giving (Islamic zakat, ‘ushour, Waqf -plural: awqaf-, Sadaqa and Christian tithes or ‘ushour), and their implications on giving trends, development work, social justice philanthropy. The field study (quantitative and qualitative) that supports the theoretical framework reflects at a national level the Egyptian public’s perceptions on philanthropy, social justice, human rights, giving and volunteering and other concepts that determine the peoples’ civic engagement. The statistics cover 2000 households, 200 Civil Society Organizations distributed all over Egypt and interviews donors, recipients, religious people and other stakeholders. The numbers reflect philanthropic trends and for the first time provide a monetary estimate of local philanthropy of over USD 1 Billion annually. The survey proves that the per capita share of philanthropy outweighs the per capita share of foreign economic assistance to Egypt, which implies the significance of local giving if properly channeled, and not as it is actually consumed in the vicious circle of ad-hoc, person to person charity. In addition, the study relates local giving mechanisms derived from religion and culture to modern actual structures, like community foundations or community waqf that could bring about sustainable change in the communities. In sum, the work provides a comprehensive scientific base to help understand- and build on local philanthropy in Egypt. It explores the role that local individual giving could play in achieving sustainable development and building a new wave of community foundations not only in Egypt but in the Arab region at large. As a tangible result of this thesis, an innovative model that revives the concept of waqf and builds on the study’s results was created by the researcher and a dedicated board of trustees who succeeded in establishing Waqfeyat al Maadi Community Foundation (WMCF) that not only introduces the community foundation model to Egypt, but revives and modernizes the waqf as a practical authentic philanthropic structure.

Historical studies investigating the interrelationships between the law and the society in which it operates have burgeoned over the past two decades. Earlier works tended to consider the operation of the law as a discrete area, best examined in biographies of judicial figures or in analyses of specific laws over time. More recent studies recognise that the complex interaction between the operation of the law and the life of the community in which it is applied is an important area of research. Nevertheless, the idea that colonial Australian law was wholly dependent upon English law and tradition is not long dead, and more attention is required regarding how law was shaped by its application in regional and frontier Australian colonial communities. Indeed, regional studies are vital to establish how the law was adopted or adapted to suit diverse Australian colonial conditions. This dissertation investigates the establishment and operation of the law in Rockhampton and district, Central Queensland, in the twenty years from the proclamation of the town in 1858. It examines a variety of aspects of the development and application of law in the region, including proceedings of the higher courts that visited the town and the lower petty courts controlled by local honorary and stipendiary magistrates; the functioning of the town police and local detachments of the native mounted police force; the development and administration of municipal law; and the responses of the Rockhampton community to the law as it was perceived in the regional setting. The frequently tense and fraught relationship between the community and colonial law-makers is analysed; an expectation in Rockhampton that the law should evolve in a manner that best suited the progress of the town caused friction with the capital. The dissertation also focuses on how the law was applied to the vulnerable and marginalised, in particular wives, children, morally suspect women, Aborigines, immigrants and servants. The idea that the law should serve progress and respond flexibly to circumstances had damaging consequences for those regarded as detrimental to the 'civilised' social and economic development of town and district.

In the thesis I consider the potential effectiveness of the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 4 of 2000 (hereafter “the Act”) in reaching its stated goal of achieving societal transformation in South Africa. I consider and analyse those socio-legal theories that have a bearing on the relationship between “law” and “society”, and the extent to which state law may be used in a “top-down” or instrumental fashion to steer society in a desired direction. I identify several characteristics of effective laws and compare these to the Act. As the Act is the South African version of what may be termed “antidiscrimination legislation”, I determine the usual shortcomings of this legislation in foreign jurisdictions, and identify the steps the South African legislature has taken to obviate these shortcomings. This thesis analyses four requirements of effective laws in more detail: (i) that the enforcementmechanisms should consist of specialised bodies staffed by well-trained personnel; (ii) that the source of the new law must be authoritative and prestigious; (iii) that the purpose behind the legislation must at least to a degree be compatible with existing values; and (iv) that the required change must be communicated to the large majority of the population. In order to assess the degree of expertise of equality court personnel, the first requirement above, I discuss and analyse the implementation of training programmes for court personnel tasked to preside in courts applying the Act. I illustrate that the current pool of equality court personnel was probably inadequately trained, inter alia because the individuals tasked to manage the training of equality court personnel did not follow good management practice. As to the second and third requirements of effective legislation referred to above, I report on an empirical study relating to unfair discrimination undertaken in 2001 in “white Pretoria”, Mamelodi and Atteridgeville. The results of this study suggest that the majority of South Africans do not experience explicit discrimination and where they do, they generally do not approach courts to have their grievances aired. In turn, this finding suggests that the Act will be underutilised and will not play the role envisaged for it by Parliament in combating discrimination. As to the last requirement highlighted above, I illustrate that the public awareness campaign relating to the Act was inadequate in its impact. In conclusion, the study identifies a number of weaknesses in the Act and proposes a range of amendments that would facilitate the use of these courts by complainants. I also identify further avenues of socio-legal research that could be undertaken relating to the Act, specifically how the Act may be utilised to combat poverty in South Africa.
Thesis (LLD)--University of Pretoria, 2008.
Jurisprudence
LLD
Unrestricted