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Listed in: Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, as LJST-06
Adam Sitze (Section 01)
The goal of this course will be to understand some of the problems posed for legal studies in the humanities by the emergence of the system of administrative and constitutional law known as apartheid. This system, which was designed to institute "separate development for separate peoples" in South Africa, is widely and rightly regarded to be among the most inhuman regimes of the 20th century. Yet even and especially today, more than a decade after its formal end in South Africa, apartheid's social, economic, and epistemic conditions of possibility, as well as the place and function of lawyers, legal discourse, and legal scholars in the resistance to it, remains at best vaguely understood. This course is designed to remedy this gap. Our inquiry will be at once specific and general. Under what economic and political conditions did apartheid come into being? What legal traditions and practices authorized its codification? What academic disciplines and intellectual formations rendered it intelligible and enabled its theorization? What specific arrangement of juridical institutions, practices, and theories together comprised the apartheid state? What was the place and function of law in the critique of and resistance to apartheid? What new and specific problems did apartheid pose for legal theory? Readings will include Richard Abel, Hannah Arendt, etienne Balibar, Steven Biko, Martin Chanock, Jacques Derrida, A.V. Dicey, John Dugard, Ronald Dworkin, Ruth First, George Frederickson, R. A. Hoernle, Mahmood Mamdani, Nelson Mandela, Anthony Mathews, Mary Robinson, Albie Sachs, and Helen Suzman. Limited to 50 students. First semester. Professor Sitze.