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South African Law Resources

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Contents

[edit] Legislation

Contributions to this page by:

- Paul Jacobson
- Jonathan Smith (Adv.)


Legislation that affects ownership:

When it comes to legislation, section 12(8)(a) of the Copyright Act provides as follows:

"No copyright shall subsist in official texts of a legislative, administrative or legal nature, or in official translations of such texts, or in speeches of a political nature or in speeches delivered in the course of legal proceedings, or in news of the day that are mere items of press information."

Where copyright would vest is in unofficial texts created by publishers or any person who takes an official text and reformats that official text or otherwise creates a derivative of it.

[edit] National

Resource title: Government Information service
URL: Government Information site
Formats: Primarily PDF
Ownership (of org): Copyright in these documents vests in the Government Communication and Information System. The Terms of use grant users the right to "view, copy, download to a local drive, print and distribute the content of this website, or any part thereof only for non-commercial informational or reference purposes."

Commercial use is permitted with prior written permission.
Copyright: No copyright on official texts.
Costs: Free, provided personal use. There may be a cost for commercial use.
Languages: English is the dominant language for these resources.
Years (available): Back to 1993 in most instances.

Resource title: Commercial providers
URL: Juta & Co. and LexisNexis Butterworths
Formats: Online, CD-ROM and printed versions
Ownership (of org): These publishers retain full copyright.
Copyright: Vested in publishers as authors of derivative works of the official texts.
Costs: Costs for a set of legislation can be as high as R4 600 for a monthly subscription on CD-ROM or around R3 200 for the 2006/7 printed edition. There is also a subscription model for Internet access to the collection. These prices are according to Juta & Co. catalogue accessed on 26 July 2007.
Languages: English is the dominant language for these resources. I believe there is also an Afrikaans version of most reference works.
Years (available): Pretty much all available editions.


[edit] Provincial

Much of what is set out above regarding national legislation would apply to provincial legislation. The provincial government websites appear to have catalogues of their legislation in PDF format.

The following sites grant access to Gauteng's, WC's and KZN's provincial legislation.

http://www.gpg.gov.za/docs/legislation/index.html

http://www.wcpp.gov.za/Documents/act.asp

http://www.kznded.gov.za/PoliciesLegislation/tabid/263/Default.aspx

[edit] Local

By-laws are generally available online but two limitations might apply:

(a) smaller local authorities may not have been able to provide their by-laws electronically, in which case a written request to provide such by-laws shall be necessary;

(b) older by-laws (those promulgated prior to 1994) may not be available on-line, in which case they may need to be requested in writing.

Municipalities are obliged to respond to written requests for copies of by-laws immediately in terms of the Access to Information Act.

Some links to the municipal by-laws of the larger local authorities:

http://www.joburg.org.za/city_vision/bylaws.stm

http://www.capetown.gov.za/by-laws/default.asp

http://www.ekurhuleni.com/ekurhuleni/article.jsp?id=1001012

mailto:metroceo@durban.gov.za

http://www.buffalocity.gov.za/municipality/bylaws.stm

http://www.tshwane.gov.za/bylaws_p.cfm

[edit] Cases

[edit] Introduction

Judgments are available directly from superior courts (local and provincial divisions of the High Court, the Supreme Court of Appeal and the Constitutional Court). The courts make their judgments available on the Web in varying degrees and in varying formats, the most popular of which seem to be PDF and Microsoft Word.

[edit] SAFLII

The South African Legal Information Institute is involved in a project to collect and scan all judgments handed down by the courts of 16 sub-Saharan countries. The content is intended to be open to the public and is licensed under a license approximating a Creative Commons Attribution license and this is set out in the terms of use. The scope of SAFLII appears to be fairly broad and could encompass a wide variety of reference works. For example, here is the South Africa catalogue.

Judgments available on SAFLII's site generally do not include commentary found in commercial case reports.

[edit] Commercial providers

Juta & Co. and LexisNexis Butterworths publish case reports which include the text of a judgment and commentary on the judgments. These reports are fairly well organised and comprehensive and are generally available on a subscription basis. A subscription to Juta's South African Law Reports is available online (R5 712 for a single user for a year), on CD-ROM (R15 112 for a quarterly update, R16 052 for monthly updates).

[edit] Analysis

At present the open law initiatives are slowly gaining on their commercial equivalents and the law is becoming more and more accessible to a broader cross-section of the population. This shift is tremendously important because more meaningful and open access to the law is necessary for the promotion and protection of a number of fundamental rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights which, in turn, shapes the legal, political, social and economic frameworks of South African society and government.

[edit] yeter

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