In the wake of apartheid, Law and Sacrifice draws on the uniquely expansive protection of fundamental rights now entrenched in the South African Constitution to outline a new theory of law.

The South African Constitution not only protects the rights of the people against abuses of power by the state, but also against abuses of power by private legal subjects. Drawing upon the work of contemporary thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, George Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-luc Nancy, the author elicits the radical democratic potential of this ‘horizontal’ notion of rights. Johan van der Walt argues that apartheid  must be understood as more that a racist abuse of power, and here he articulates it ‘sacrificial logic’. It is in going beyond this logic that the South African Constitution can be understood: in a  radical formal and substantive equality that offers the legal basis for rethinking a post-apartheid future.

Johan van der Walt is Professor of Law at the University of Johannesburg, where he teaches law and jurisprudence.

With Birkbeck Law Press (UK)