South African Law

Finding National Legislation 

Acts and Regulations in Force (Compilations including Amendments)

The open access Laws of South Africa (from the University of Pretoria) Current Legislation lists compilations of national in force legislation by topic and title - and links to full text Acts and Regulations. The database can also be searched. This database is a work in progress - it does not have all legislation, but does contain the most important. Please note that this database does NOT contain historical (point-in-time) Acts, but it does contain historical Regulations.

The Law Library does not have access to subscription legislation databases such as those on JUTA and Sabinet that enable, for example, sophisticated searching and links to commentary and cases on the provisions. We also have no access to point-in-time or repealed legislation. 

Acts as Passed

Full text Acts as passed from 1993 to current are available on the following open access databases:

• The official South African Government  website. Acts may be browsed by year or searched by keyword. 
• Polity - although a non-government site, the links to the Acts are often to the official Government Gazette versions. The site has far better searching and browsing capabilities than the offical government sites - it can be browsed by year and/or topic, and has fairly sophisticated search capabilities. Note that to browse years prior to 2016, you need to select a topic first. 

Citing South African Legislation in AGLC Compliant Style 

To cite in AGLC compliant style, see 23.2.1 in AGLC4 (view only PDF version available on open access)