Method

One of the problems of enduring interest raised by the unhappy history of the South African state in the twentieth century has been the existence of a legal system clearly based on the liberal forms of law at the heart of a racist and oppressive state. An attempt to understand this immediately raises the question of how to approach relationships between law and other processes of the state. I have tried to write a general history of a period in South African law, rather than about parts of it, and this venture has raised many problems. The first concern with any communication must be audience. Legal history can be written for a predominantly legal audience, as an internal history of the development of doctrine. It can be written for a more general audience in order to explain the arcane world of the ‘legal’ in accessible ways. It can also be written as a broader contextualised history, both to make the broader audience aware that the law is not arcane and specialised but a part of the polity and culture which must be understood, and also to reinterpret law to the legal audience. But contextualising the study of law assumes in its simplest form a separability between law and politics, economy, society and culture, and this is too simple a model with which to work. Contextualising also raises purely practical problems, those of the feasibility and length of such a venture.