| dc.description.abstract | John Dugard is a household name in the law of South Africa. Perhaps even before that, but certainly since his inaugural lecture was published fully 50 years ago (see 'The judicial process, positivism and civil liberty' (1971) 88 SALJ 181), no one even passingly concerned about the rule of law and the administration of justice in this country could have failed to note Dugard's challenging stance. This lecture is discussed in the book and it deserves such treatment in that it was a remarkably brave and intellectually incisive article. It was delivered at the height of apartheid, and in an atmosphere of great hostility to the few public critics of the regime It carved out a theory of adjudication which at that time was being developed in similar fashion by Ronald Dworkin in his Taking Rights Seriously. In itself, this illustrates the cutting-edge nature of Dugard's scholarship. From his vantage point at the Law Faculty of Wits University, and with an occasional foray into the courts as an advocate, John Dugard raised vital questions about the relationship between law and justice under apartheid, most comprehensively and devastatingly catalogued in his Human Rights and the South African Legal Order (1978), tellingly published by Princeton | en_US |
