Principle and pragmatism on the Constitutional Court of South Africa
Principle and pragmatism on the Constitutional Court of South Africa
复制标题
南非宪法法院的原则与实用主义
DOI：
10.1093/icon/mon029
复制
发表时间：
2008
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
T. Roux
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
T. Roux
虽然缺乏公众支持，南非宪法法院今天发现自己处于相对制度安全的地位。与此同时，它在新民主国家的宪法法院中建立了令人羡慕的声誉，因为它的判例或法律的意义上的合法性具有技术质量。本文试图通过对法律的合法性、公众支持和制度安全之间关系的理论解释，并利用这一解释来解释CCSA 1995年至2006年的记录，来解释这种情况是如何发生的。这一时期南非政治的主要特征是由一个政党统治。在这种背景下，理论解释表明，CCSA在很大程度上应该能够忽视其缺乏公众支持的情况，而倾向于管理其与政治分支的关系。特别是，人们会期望CCSA已经权衡了法律的合法性的收益，通过有原则的决策来实现，而不是考虑其决定对其机构安全的可能影响。对该委员会的一些重大决定的审查表明，它确实以这种方式采取了战略行动，无论是在政治上有争议的案件中，它利用其灵活的分权理论避免与政治部门直接对抗，还是在更常规的案件中，它制定了一些对背景敏感的审查标准。
Though lacking in public support, the Constitutional Court of South Africa (CCSA) today finds itself in a position of relative institutional security. At the same time, it has built up an enviable reputation among constitutional courts in new democracies for the technical quality of its jurisprudence or legitimacy in the legal sense. This essay attempts to explain how this situation has come about by developing a theoretical account of the relationship between legal legitimacy, public support, and institutional security, and then using this account to interpret the CCSA's record from 1995 to 2006. The defining feature of South African politics over this period has been its domination by a single political party. In this context, the theoretical account suggests, the CCSA should largely have been able to ignore its lack of public support in favor of managing its relationship with the political branches. In particular, one would expect the CCSA to have traded off gains in legal legitimacy, achieved by principled decision making, against considerations of the likely impact of its decisions on its institutional security. An examination of some of the CCSA's major decisions reveals that it, indeed, has acted strategically in this way, both in politically controversial cases, where it has used its flexible separation-of-powers doctrine to avoid direct confrontation with the political branches, and in more routine cases, where it has developed a number of context-sensitive review standards.