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The Selfless Constitution

Experimentalism and Flourishing as Foundations of South Africa's Basic Law
  • Acknowledgements: Download
  • Preface: Download
  • Chapter One-A: Download

    The Basic Structure and the Methodology of the Argument

  • Chapter One-B: Download

    Why Rethinking the Foundations of South African Constitutional Law is Necessary

  • Chapter One-C: Download

    How Rethinking Our Understanding of the Self and the Social Services a Better Constitutional Theory

  • Chapter Two: Download

    A Theory of the Self: Consciousness and Radically Heterogeneous Selves as Feedback Mechanisms

  • Chapter Three: Download

    A Theory of the Social: Constraint, Friction and Change

  • Chapter Four Download

    A Theory of the Constitutional: Experimental Constitutionalism

  • Chapter Five Download

    Experimental Constitutionalism in South Africa: Institutions and Doctrines

  • Chapter Six Download

    Experimental Constitutionalism in South Africa: The Evolution of Law and Policy in Housing and Education

  • Chapter Seven Download

    Flourishing and Fundamental Rights under the South African Constitution

  • Chapter Eight Download

    Tweaking Doctrine: Constitutional Court Cases Revisited and Revised

  • Chapter Nine Download

    Coda : The Crooked Timber of Democracy

  • Bibliography Download
  • Table of Cases Download
  • Glossary Download
  • Subject Matter Index Download
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About The Author

Stu Woolman

Stu Woolman currently holds the positions of Professor of Law, and recently, Elizabeth Bradley Chair of Ethics, Governance and Sustainable Development at the University of the Witwatersrand. He also enjoys the title of Academic Director at the South Africa Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law. Stu is the creator, editor-in-chief and primary author of the seminal 5 volume treatise, Constitutional Law of South Africa and creator and editor-in-chief of the Constitutional Court Review. He has penned two highly praised monographs: The Selfless Constitution: Experimentalism and Flourishing as Foundations of South Africa’s Basic Law (2013) and The Constitution in the Classroom: Law and Education in South Africa, 1994 - 2008 (2009). He has published five collections as co-author and co-editor: The Business of Sustainable Development in Africa (2009)(Winner of the 2010 Hindiggh-Currie Award for Best Book); The Dignity Jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of South Africa (2013); Is This Seat Taken?: Conversations at the Bar, Bench and Academy about the South African Constitution (2012) and Constitutional Conversations (2008). In over 100 articles and book chapters, Professor Woolman has traversed such varied subject matter as institutional constitutional law, bill of rights analysis, jurisprudence, applied analytic and empirical philosophy, education policy, HIV/AIDs law, consciousness studies, social capital theory, patent thickets, development economics, psychoanalytic theory, international human rights codes, sexual slavery, forced labour, refugee and immigration law, corporate social responsibility and alternative business models. The quality and the importance of his work has received recognition from the National Research Foundation as a B-Rated Internationally Acclaimed and Influential Researcher (2014), from the University of Pretoria as 2007’s Extraordinary University Researcher, and from the University of the Witwatersrand in the form of the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Best Researcher under 40 (1996). Stu has worked for the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the Goldstone Commission of Inquiry into Public Violence and Intimidation and the Centre for Human Rights, and taught at Columbia Law School, the University of Pretoria Faculty of Law, the University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Business Administration and the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law. He holds degrees in philosophy - Wesleyan (BA)(Hons), Columbia (MA) -- and law -- Columbia (JD), Pretoria (PhD).

Professor Stu Woolman CV

Books and Publications

In over 100 articles and book chapters, Professor Woolman has traversed such varied subject matter as institutional constitutional law, bill of rights analysis, jurisprudence, applied analytic and empirical philosophy, education policy, HIV/AIDs law, consciousness studies, social capital theory, patent thickets, development economics, psychoanalytic theory, international human rights codes, sexual slavery, forced labour, refugee and immigration law, corporate social responsibility and alternative business models.

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Book Reviews

  • Stu Woolman is one of the leading constitutional law scholars in South Africa for a reason. His Selfless Constitution -- a philosophical tour de force -- bestows upon us an utterly original way to think about constitutional jurisprudence in South Africa. In so doing, the book underwrites a host of novel and imaginative contributions to contemporary currents in interdisciplinary legal thought, sociology of law, philosophy, and political theory.

    - Professor Drucilla Cornell, Jurisprudence and Political Science, Rutgers University/University of London



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    NOTE: NAVIGATE TO PEER REVIEWS USING THE ARROWS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE

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    • In this extremely impressive work, Stu Woolman sets out to provide an original theoretical foundation for South African constitutional law and jurisprudence by drawing on arguments from contemporary philosophy as well as empirical findings from the natural sciences and the social sciences... read more

      - Denise Meyerson, Professor, University of Melbourne, (2014) 14 Macquarie Law Journal 205 and in
      (2014) 30 South African Journal on Human Rights 591
    • Stu Woolman’s new book is an ambitious work, which expounds a theory of constitutionalism which breaks with traditional understandings of the self, the social and constitutional law, and seeks to reconceive them in a number of ways... read more

      - Henk Botha, Professor, University of Stellenbosch, (2014) 25 Stellenbosch Law Review 225
    • Despite more than once describing his endeavour in The Selfless Constitution as modest, Stu Woolman sets himself the ambitious task of elucidating the foundations and purposes of the South African Constitution and critiquing the jurisprudence it has engendered... read more

      - Patrick Lenta, Professor, University of Kwazulu-Natal,
      (2014) 131 South African Law Journal 208
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    • In The Selfless Constitution, Stu Woolman has accomplished a tour de force of interdisciplinary legal thought. Drawing on insights ranging from the neuroscientific evidence on the nature of consciousness to an encyclopaedic knowledge of the issues and decisions of South African constitutional law’s first twenty years, Woolman builds a theory of experimental constitutionalism keyed to South African conditions and to post-apartheid South Africa’s normative commitments to dignity, equality and liberty... read more

      - Professor Stephen Ellmann, Director of Clinical and Experiential Learning, New York Law School
    • The Selfless Constitution delivers something extremely rare in South African legal literature: an intellectually ambitious book that fuses insights from fields outside the law with a thorough and imaginative engagement with legal precedent... read more

      - Michael Bishop, University of Cape Town; Counsel, Legal Resources Centre; Advocate, Cape High Court
    • Professor Woolman makes an unduly modest assertion when, near end of this remarkable book, he writes that his object has been to encourage its readers ‘to reconsider previously held practices’. read more

      - Professor David Zeffertt, University of the Witwatersrand
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