• A Hohfeldian analysis of the Bill of Rights
    South African Law Journal 139 (3): 577-622. 2022.
    In the scholarship on rights, one name is pre-eminent: Hohfeld. Despite this, there are two ways in which the Hohfeldian analysis of rights remains underappreciated. The first is that it is commonly assumed that the Hohfeldian analytic system applies only to private-law rights. The second is that South African lawyers remain mostly unfamiliar with the Hohfeldian analytic system. By providing a Hohfeldian analysis of the South African Bill of Rights, this article aims to set the record straight i…Read more
  •  1
    Functions of legal indeterminacy
    Journal of Contemporary Roman-Dutch Law 85 (2): 240-247. 2022.
    That the law should guide those who are subject to it is both requirement and rationale of the law. Yet many legal norms are indeterminate and, therefore, incapable of guiding the conduct of their subjects. This note seeks to answer part of the conceptual puzzle implied by the use of such legal norms: does their indeterminacy serve some positive function? I proceed by way of literature review to identify seven functions of legal indeterminacy that scholars have identified but note that their use…Read more
  •  56
    Sources of legal indeterminacy
    South African Law Journal 138 (1): 115-151. 2021.
    Traditional analyses characterise or identify vagueness and ambiguity as the sole or primary sources of legal indeterminacy. In this article, I identify and characterise various other sources of legal indeterminacy. In addition to the semantic indeterminacy of vagueness and ambiguity, philosophers of language have identified conversational, pragmatic, and contextual indeterminacy, each of which is capable of generating a ‘hard case’ as applied to the legal sphere. Nor is all legal indeterminacy …Read more