|
Description
Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? by James L. Gibson Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation (2004) Price: $47.50
Law and legal institutions have always drawn heavily from their cultural contexts in formulating assumptions, interpretations, and normative standards. Similarly, legal institutions can effect large changes in cultural norms and structures that in turn can change popular notions of justice. Truth commissions, themselves part legal and part cultural institutions, have by their very nature always implicitly acknowledged this feedback loop. But South Africa made it explicit to a greater degree than had ever been done before. Its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by a cleric rather than a jurist, simultaneously intervened both in concrete questions around the legal status of individual actors from the apartheid regime and its opposition, and in more abstract questions about the role of that immediate history in the remaking of the country's values. The TRC thus explicitly tied questions of law to questions of culture as crucial to its role in instituting a human rights... |
More articles from Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal
The Dark Sides of Virtue.(Book Review), January 01, 2005
Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poo..., January 01, 2005
The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from ..., January 01, 2005
Looking for additional articles?
Click here
to search our database of over 3 million articles.
|
%20%20&position=1)