Pierre de Vos teaches Constitutional law at the University of Cape Town Law Faculty, where he is head of the Department of Public Law. He writes a blog, entitled 'Constitutionally Speaking', in which he attempts to mix one part righteous anger, one part cold legal reasoning and one part irreverence to help keep South Africans informed about Constitutional and other legal developments related to the democracy.
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When I heard that President Cyril Ramaphosa had signed the new Expropriation Act, I felt just a tad annoyed. Not only would I now feel obliged to study the details of the act (a boring and rather technical piece of legislation), it was also going to make it very difficult for me to stick to my New Year’s resolution to ignore (or at least not to respond to) any hysterical, uninformed, or legally questionable takes on constitutional law issues.
I managed to keep to my resolution until last week, when Donald Trump (channelling Elon Musk) falsely claimed that “South Africa is confiscating land” and then issued an executive order instructing members of his administration to “prioritise humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement… for Afrikaners in South Africa”. (I had sadly broken my vow...
On February 26, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a significant False Claims Act (FCA) ruling in United States of America ex rel. Cheryl Taylor v. Healthcare ...