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Brief Summary The African continent exceeds in size and natural resources the combined territories of Europe, the United States and China. Yet most Africans must struggle for bare survival. The authors of this book s chapters describe different African countries experiences, underscoring the need to use law to transform Africa s inherited institutions. Chapter 2 outlines institutionalist legislative theory and methodology as a guide for designing laws to achieve good governance and people-oriented development. Raymond Atuguba describes how, for almost half a century after independence, Ghana s police force still mainly buttressed elite state power. Atuguba and his colleagues, working through the Legal Resources Centre, eventually hope to propose legislation to promote all Ghanaians welfare. Teodosio Uate s chapter demonstrates how, despite a 1997 law calling for citizen engagement in environmental protection, the inherited drafting system had thwarted the drafters attempts to prescribe clearly and precisely what officials must do to realize popular participation. Neva Makgetla describes South Africa s post-apartheid governmental efforts to restructure the massive inequalities imposed by the preceding regime. Inherited administrative institutions too often excluded from decision-making the new government s core constituencies the working people, the unemployed, and the poor in general Lucian Ng andwe justifies his proposed law to establish a Zambian Commission on Law and National Integrated Development. That Commission would conduct research and design and submit bills, accompanied by reports of the facts logically-organized, to demonstrate, that those bills detailed provisions would facilitate transformation of the inherited institutions that today perpetuate Zambia s poverty, vulnerability and poor governance. ISBN:9781592214716 Author:Ann Willcox Seidman

Brief Summary The Land Is Ours tells the story of South Africa’s first black lawyers, who operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an age of aggressive colonial expansion, land dispossession and forced labour, these men believed in a constitutional system that respected individual rights and freedoms, and they used the law as an instrument against injustice. The book follows the lives, ideas and careers of Henry Sylvester Williams, Alfred Mangena, Richard Msimang, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Ngcubu Poswayo and George Montsioa, who were all members of the ANC. It analyses the legal cases they took on, explores how they reconciled the law with the political upheavals of the day, and considers how they sustained their fidelity to the law when legal victories were undermined by politics. The Land Is Ours shows that these lawyers developed the concept of a Bill of Rights, which is now an international norm. The book is particularly relevant in light of current calls to scrap the Constitution and its protections of individual rights: it clearly demonstrates that, from the beginning, the struggle for freedom was based on the idea of the rule of law. ISBN:9781776092857 Author:Tembeka Ngcukaitobi