South African Law

Books and journal articles

• Use the Library catalogue to find print and ebooks by keyword
• See the Books box below
• Look for books at KR 4227 on the shelves on Level 5 in the Law Library

To find journal articles - see the Journals page in this Guide

Other sources of commentary

• Oxford Constitutions of the World (UniMelb staff & student access). The Republic of South Africa: Introductory Note by Francois Venter (written in 2016) provides an excellent scholarly overview of the current 1996 Constitution, links to the text of the Constitution, and refers to case law.
• Kluwer law Online: International encyclopedia for constitutional law (UniMelb staff & student access). Contains history and two detailed commentaries on the South African Constitution - one national and one on the provincial arrangements created by the Constitution. Both include references to cases. Scroll to South Africa under the 'National Monographs' heading and the 'Sub-national Constitutional Law' heading. Last updated in 2014.
• HEINOnline World Constitutions Illustrated: South Africa (UniMelb staff & student access). Includes commentaries, scholarly articles and a bibliography of selected works. Please note that much of the HeinOnline commentary is quite old, and may be more useful for historical rather than contemporary research.

The Constitutional Court website provides a useful brief historical timeline of the Constitution and information on writing the final Constitution. The website also contains an outline of the history of the Constitutional Court.