Judging from comments in judicial opinions and academic journals, South Africa's Constitutional Court is held in high esteem around the world. Although this might seem an unsurprising response to the highest court in a post-apartheid South Africa, this chapter argues that the Court's image as well as its judicial authority are the product of a very particular set of conditions and politics and cannot be taken for granted now or in the future. Implicit in this argument is the idea that the Constitutional Court plays a number of different roles that vary over time. In order to understand the evolution of the Constitutional Court and of its roles in the governance of the country, it is important to explore three dimensions of the Court's history and function, which taken together, provide insight into the way in which the courts and judges have entered into national political life, and what difference their participation has made in the construction of constitutional democracy in South Africa. These three dimensions are: (1) the sources of judicial authority; (2) the practice of the judiciary in exercising this authority; and (3) the challenges faced by the court as political conditions shift, and as it is confronted with increasingly difficult cases rooted in seemingly intractable socioeconomic and political conditions.