A title deed = tenure security. Or does it? This book challenges this simple equation and its apparently self-evident assumptions. It argues that two very different property paradigms characterise South Africa.

The first is the dominant paradigm of private property, referred to as an ‘edifice’, against which all other property regimes are measured and ranked. However, the majority of South Africans gain access to land and housing through very different processes, which this book calls social or off-register tenures. These tenures are poorly understood, a gap Untitled aims to address. The book reveals that ‘informal’ and customary property systems can be well organised, often providing substantial tenure security, but lack official recognition and support. This makes them difficult to service and vulnerable to elite capture.

Policy interventions usually aim to formalise these arrangements by issuing title deeds. The case studies in this book, which span both rural and urban contexts in South Africa, examine these interventions and the unintended consequences they often give rise to. Interventions based on an understanding of locally embedded property relations are more likely to succeed than those that attempt to transform them into registered tenures. However, emerging practices hit intractable obstacles associated with the ‘edifice’, which only a substantial transformation of the legal paradigms can overcome.

Part of the Juta’s Property Law Library series, this new edition offers a comprehensive and authoritative discussion of all aspects of property law in South Africa.

The 3rd edition reflects recent developments in case law and literature, and expands extensively on the new comparative sections which include asset forfeiture, constructive expropriation and the public-purpose requirement for expropriation.

The author has won international acclaim for his work in the field.

This book is an introductory text for students of property law

The book provides undergraduate students with an extensive exposition of the general principles of South African Property Law. It is a sister title to Silberberg and Schoeman's The Law of Property which is written for postgraduate students and legal practitioners.

The Principles of The Law of Property in South Africa, Second Edition, offers a thorough, current and accessible introduction to the general principles of property law in South Africa. Including diverse perspectives, the second edition foregrounds discussion of constitutional perspectives to engage with critical issues and debates that arise within the current and dynamic socio-economic context.

The text presents fundamental principles within a clear and applied conceptual framework, and is designed to support independent, enquiring and critical engagement with the subject matter.

The Principles of The Law of Property in South Africa 2e is appropriate as core material for LLB courses that address property law. The text is also a useful resource for practitioners who wish to engage with foundational and current principles of the field.

The last monograph to be dedicated exclusively to the law of servitudes in South African law was the 1973 edition of Hall & Kellaway: Servitudes. Since then, interesting regulatory and constitutional issues have arisen in servitude disputes.

The Law of Servitudes covers the traditional areas of the law relating to servitudes, such as the nature and characteristics of servitudes, the acquisition of servitudes, the relationship between the servitude holder and the landowner (including remedies available to either party), the termination of servitudes, and includes separate chapters on praedial servitudes, personal servitudes, and statutory and public servitudes.

The Law of Servitudes seeks to establish the current state of the law, seen in the context of its historical development in South Africa, as well as to consider the current position with reference to the effect of the Constitution on the development of private law.

Land In South Africa examines how land and agrarian reform impacts nation building, citizenship, and identity formation. The publication draws attention to the limitations of reducing land to a commodity, and how this approach perpetuates social conflict and inequality in land reform policy implementation.

The book posits an alternative policy paradigm, which discusses contested meanings of land and their relation to nation formation. It brings to the fore citizen stakeholder perspectives from former labour tenants, citizens residing in communally owned land, women subsistence farmers, peasant movements and land reform civil society groups.

The chapters investigate the diverse and contested meanings of land to elevate how South Africans perceive land justice and reform, while also including several international case studies. The publication argues that land power relations and policy debates are constitutive components of nation building. And, importantly, that land shapes essential pillars in nation formation such as citizenship, political identity, heritage, a sense of belonging and social disparities.

Property in Minerals and Petroleum is the first major academic text to analyse the state-custodianship concept in South African law with emphasis on its application in mineral and petroleum law. As such, the book seeks to stimulate academic discourse about the impact of the incorporation of state custodianship in this field of law. The book considers the nature of mineral and petroleum rights in a state-custodianship model within a constitutional context. It clarifies the institutional regime change that lead to the regulatory context in which such rights now can be acquired, transferred or lost. The first chapter of Property in Minerals and Petroleum focuses on the constitutional imperatives for reform in mineral and petroleum law, and on the changing concepts of property and landownership that paved the way for transformation. Further chapters evaluate the pre-2004 mineral and petroleum law dispensation and address the current dispensation under the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA). The section on the MPRDA focuses on the aims and objectives of the Act; the notion of state custodianship and its impact on existing property law; the meaning of the terms `mineral' and `petroleum'; the nature, content and regulation of rights to minerals and petroleum; the acquisition, transfer and termination of such rights; and various miscellaneous aspects that straddle existing property law principles and the regulation of minerals and petroleum.

A Restatement of the English Law of Unjust Enrichment represents a wholly novel idea within English law. Designed to enhance understanding of the common law the Restatement comprises a set of clear succinct rules, fully explained by a supporting commentary, that sets out the law in England and Wales on unjust enrichment. Written by one of the leading authorities in the area, in collaboration with a group of senior judges, academics, and legal practitioners, the Restatement offers a powerfully persuasive statement of the law in this newly recognized and uncertain branch of English law. Many lawyers and students find unjust enrichment a particularly difficult area to master. Combining archaic terminology with an historic failure to provide a clear conceptual structure, the law remained obscure until its recent rapid development in the hands of pioneering judges and academics. The Restatement builds on the clarifications that have emerged in the case law and academic literature to present the best interpretation of the current state of the law. The Restatement will be accessible to, and of great practical benefit to, students, academics, judges, and lawyers alike as they work with this area of law. The text of the Restatement is supported by full commentary explaining its provisions and roots together with its application to real and hypothetical cases. The Restatement appears as European private law takes its first steps towards harmonization. In providing an accessible survey of the English law, the Restatement will offer an important reference point for the English position on unjust enrichment in the harmonization debates. Also appearing shortly after the United States Third Restatement on Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, this Restatement offers an interesting contrast with American law in this area.

This groundbreaking collection of essays shows that, from the moment European expansion commenced through to the twentieth century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonization is well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. These essays demonstrate how indigenous peoples throughout the world opposed colonization not only with force, but also with ideas. They made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law that applies between peoples - a kind of law of nations, comparable to that being developed by Europeans. The contributors to this volume argue that in the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonization should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim.
Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 brings together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, including Rolena Adorno, Lauren Benton, Duncan Ivison, and Kristin Mann. Their combined expertise makes this volume uniquely expansive in its coverage of a crucial issue in global and colonial history. The various essays treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin America, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America (including the British colonies and French Canada), and nineteenth-century Australasia and Africa. There is no other book that examines the issue of European dispossession of native peoples in such a way.

The Rental Housing Act 50 of 1999 has been amended substantively by the Rental Housing Amendment Act 35 of 2014. The Amendment Act, which has yet to commence, creates mechanisms to ensure the proper functioning of the South African rental housing market, lays down general principles for governing conflict resolution in the rental housing market, facilitates sound relations between tenants and landlords and lays down general requirements relating to leases. The Rental Housing Act: Amendments, annotations and commentary provides an easy to- follow system to clearly identify changes to the Rental Housing Act by the forthcoming amendments and includes commentary to help the reader understand the amendments and their context and interplay with other provisions of the Act. All amendments are colour-coded, making them easy and quick to identify. This work is the go-to guide on the amended Rental Housing Act and indispensable to any participants in the South African rental housing market, such as landlords, tenants, estate agents, legal practitioners, members of the Rental Housing Tribunal and anyone who seeks to keep abreast of the latest changes to South African rental legislation.

When governments use eminent domain to transfer property between private owners, Americans are outraged-or so most media and academic accounts would have us believe. But these accounts obscure a much more complex reality in American conceptions of property. In this book, Debbie Becher presents the first comprehensive study of a city's eminent domain acquisitions, exploring how and why the City of Philadelphia took properties between 1992 and 2007 and which takings led to protests. She uses original data-collected from city offices and interviews with over a hundred residents, business owners, community leaders, government representatives, attorneys, and appraisers-to explore how eminent domain really works. Becher surprises readers by finding that the city took over 4,000 private properties, or one out of every hundred such properties in Philadelphia, during her study period. Furthermore, these takings only rarely provoked opposition-a fact that established views on property are ill-equipped to explain. To investigate how Americans judge the legitimacy of eminent domain, Becher devotes several chapters to two highly controversial sets of takings for redevelopment projects. The American Street takings were intended to win popular support for redevelopment and initially succeeded in doing so, but it ended as a near total failure and embarrassment. The Jefferson Square takings initially faced vociferous opposition, but they eventually earned residents' approval and became a political showpiece. Becher uncovers evidence that Americans judge eminent domain through a social conception of property as an investment of value, committed over time, that government is responsible for protecting. This conception has never been described in sociological, legal, political, or economic scholarship, and it stands in stark contrast to the arguments of libertarian and left-leaning activists and academics. But recognizing property as investment, Becher argues, may offer a firm new foundation for more progressive urban policies.

The Law of Landlord and Tenant revisits the law of landlord and tenant in light of the constitutional context to determine how this area of law has developed, especially since the pre-1994 era, to further constitutional goals.

The purpose of the volume is to place legislation, case law, academic analysis and policy considerations in the context of the constitutional framework within which private law rights are acquired, exercised and transferred or lost, but also add to existing academic commentary some sections of foreign law where the comparison might provide insight to the South African landlord-tenant context.

Zimbabwe’s Constitution of 2013 provides for multi-level government at national, provincial and local level. This book explores the nature, evolution and future of this multi-level system of government against the background of international best practices.

Provincial and Local Government Reform in Zimbabwe: An analysis of the Law, Policy and Practice considers key questions about the multi-level system of government and shows how it radically differs from the old Lancaster House constitutional order.

The roles that provincial and local governments, as well as traditional leaders, fulfil in the new order are examined, the reforms needed to implement the system are outlined, and lessons to be learnt from other countries with multi-level governments are considered.

This book aims to aid the realisation of Zimbabwe’s constitutional goals of development, democracy and peace through effective multilevel governance and contributes to the international discourse on decentralisation and the role of subnational governments in Africa.

The Estates Gazette Law Reports are an indispensable reference for property law practitioners (over 15,000 in the UK) researching and advising on all aspects of: landlord & tenant, valuation, professional negligence, conveyancing, real property, leasehold enfranchisement & compensation.

They comprise the law reports published in Estates Gazette plus new and original cases published for the first time in EGLR. Each volume includes the most significant property cases determined in any given year and is published in three hardback volumes with corresponding head note.

Cases are selected by HH Judge Hazel Marshall QC, Senior Chancery Judge at the Central London County Court.

These reports are available by annual subscription or by volume.

Cases selected by a top Chancery Judge
Provides detailed and clearly written head notes
References all cases in a subject matter index
Offers cases additional to those published in EG

Part of the Juta's Property Law Library series, Land Reform covers all legal developments spanning the first phase or exploratory land reform programme that was embarked upon in 1991, followed by the all-encompassing land reform programme that coincided with the constitutional dispensation, until July 2013. Land reform is approached with reference to its various contexts, drawing the broad categories of state land and private land that are further subdivided into urban and rural contexts, where relevant. All relevant legislative measures and policy documents are set out and major court decisions are analysed accordingly.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

South Africa's property law teachers have been convening annually since 1985 to exchange ideas, subject their work to peer scrutiny and build a collegial network. Over time, the agendas of the annual meetings became snapshots of the development of a discipline. In celebration of the 25th anniversary of this meeting, the property law teachers' colloquium was expanded into an International property law conference, giving South African property law teachers an opportunity to exchange their ideas on a much broader platform, with some of the world's best property law scholars and teachers. Property law under scrutiny brings together pieces that give an overview of property law twenty-five years after the establishment of the South African property law teachers' colloquium. A recurrent theme in all the contributions at the conference, and the ones included in this publication, is the tension between well-established principles of property law and the policies that drive legal development in the field. The topics addressed are organised into four themes, as follows: The first cluster relates to an age-old issue in conventional property law: The accession of movables to immovables; The second cluster concerns the centrality of the real agreement in transfers and in the real security context; A third cluster deals with questions about the public law aspects of property; The fourth cluster captures some of the dilemmas and challenges concerning the abandonment and neglect of property. It ties together the underlying concerns aired in debates about the conventional property rules and issues surfacing in the crossover between private and public law, and the role of property law principles. In capturing the interaction between South African and international scholarship, Property law under scrutiny serves to introduce a new era in this developing discipline. Teachers and practitioners of property law, locally and internationally, will find this to be an invaluable resource.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In law, gains, like losses, don't always lie where they fall. The circumstances in which the law requires defendants to give up their gains are well documented in the work of unjust enrichment lawyers. The same cannot be said, however, of the reasons for ordering restitution of such gains. It is often suggested that unjust enrichment's existence can be demonstrated without inquiry into these reasons, into the principles of justice it represents and invokes. Yet while we can indeed show that there exists a body of claims dealing with the recovery of mistaken payments and the like without going on to inquire into their rationale, this isn't true of unjust enrichment's existence as a distinct ground of such claims. If unjust enrichment exists as a body of like cases and claims, truly independent of contract and tort, it does so by virtue of the distinct reasons it identifies and to which these claims respond. Reason and Restitution examines the reasons which support and shape claims in unjust enrichment and how these reasons bear on the law's resolution of these claims. The identity of these reasons matters. For one thing, unjust enrichment's status as a distinct ground of liability depends on the distinctiveness of these reasons. But, more importantly, it matters to those charged with the practical tasks of deciding cases and making laws, for it is these reasons alone which can direct how judges and legislators ought to respond to these claims.

The new constitutional order has brought about substantial changes to the application of property remedies in South African law. Property Remedies investigates the ways in which various property remedies have been developed by the courts. The book shows that the transformation of remedial possibilities needs to be informed by different contexts. The book argues that it is important to consider this jurisprudential challenge in developing property remedies that are suited to a new constitutional order based on a single system of law. Property Remedies covers the traditional common-law remedies used to protect property interests, such as the rei vindicatio, the actio negatoria, the mandament van spolie, the possessory action, the actio legis aquiliae, compensation for improvements, the prohibitory interdict and the declaratory order. The book also discusses constitutionally inspired property remedies such as compensation for expropriation, constitutional damages and non-expropriatory compensation for lawful state action. The book offers guidance on how to deal with the tension between preserving the existing common-law remedies, accommodating new statutory interventions and developing the current system of property remedies in line with the Constitution.

Understanding Land Tenure Law contains a commentary on land tenure law in South Africa together with the three key pieces of legislation: the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act, the Extension of Security of Tenure Act and the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from Unlawful Occupation of Land Act.

The text explains key definitions in the law and provides useful, practical guidelines on land rights disputes. Understanding Land Tenure Law also sets out the nature and scope of legal protection available to occupiers of land and labour tenants, with a section on access to the courts, including the Land Claims Court.

This book was developed by Cheadle, Thomson and Haysom Inc under the auspices of the Department of Land Affairs' Legal Services Project of the Land Rights Management Facility.