Introduction to special issue: Class action litigation in South Africa

Abstract

This special issue on class action litigation in the South African Journal on Human Rights was initiated by a call for papers that was drafted by South African lawyer Carina du Toit. It was indeed she who had originally conceived of this idea for the special issue, identified potential authors who were working in this field and co-chaired (with me) an authors’ colloquium webinar that the South African Journal on Human Rights organised on 26 June 2020. With this substantial basis, I was happy to take the idea forward through to publication on behalf of the Journal. The call for papers that was circulated in October 2019 triggered a lot of interest from academics and practitioners alike. However, like so many other initiatives, the global Covid-19 pandemic caught us entirely off-guard, and between lockdowns, home schooling, rising infection rates and hospital admissions, campus closures and other unprecedented disruptions, we were forced to improvise, and to sharpen our IT skills. What would have been an in-person colloquium in Johannesburg became an online webinar through Zoom. Rather than meet and discuss in person, we resorted to email, Skype, Teams, Zoom and other forms of internet-based communication. But we managed in the end to produce a special issue that covers the topic well, consisting of three case notes and four full-length articles from top scholars and experienced practitioners. Human rights litigation has been a recurring topic in the Journal since we were first established as the Lawyers for Human Rights Bulletin in the late-1970s, which was renamed the South African Journal on Human Rights in 1985. Since 1994, public interest litigation has received increasing attention. A 2011 special issue on that topic – coedited by Jackie Dugard, Jonathan Klaaren and myself – also touched on the challenging prospects of bringing class actions, namely: Stuart Wilson’s contribution on housing rights. However, specific and comprehensive attention to class actions, as a particular form of legal mobilisation, has received less attention. This is of little surprise since, as Cheryl Loots observed already in 1994, the opportunities for standing to bring such cases in South African courts have traditionally been restricted, especially prior to the