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.

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.

The constitutional entrenchment and protection of property rights has always been a difficult and controversial issue. This text is more than a collection of cases on constitutional property law, it is an in-depth comparison of constitutional property clauses in jurisdictions around the world. The book consists of three parts: the first chapter contains a general discussion of comparative, theoretical, and analytical issues. The second part consists of 18 chapters on jurisdictions where the property clause has generated substantial case law and jurisprudence, meriting extensive analysis and discussion. Among the countries discussed are Australia, Japan, Canada, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa. For easy reference the structure of these country-by-country chapters is identical. These chapters not only contain practical, useful legal information but also a normative interpretation of constitutional property clauses in their national and international context. The third and final part of the book contains a collection of 86 property clauses from jurisdictions not included in the country reports. The focus of the book is on comparison, and cross-references assist the reader in finding related cases and issues in other jurisdictions.

Having its origins in the process of transformation and land reform that began to take shape in South Africa at the end of the last century, this strikingly original analysis of property starts from deep inside the property regime and not from a distant or abstract perspective on property rules and practices. Focusing on issues of stability and change in a transformative setting and on the role of tradition and legal culture in that context, the book argues that a property regime, including the system of property holdings and the rules and practices that entrench and protect them, tends to insulate itself against change through the security- and stability-seeking tendency of tradition and legal culture, including the deep assumptions about security and stability embedded in the rights paradigm, rhetoric and logic that dominate current legal culture. The rights paradigm tends to stabilise the current distribution of property holdings by securing extant property holdings on the assumption that they are lawfully acquired, socially important and politically and morally legitimate. This function of the rights paradigm tends to resist or minimise change, including change brought about by morally, politically and legally legitimate and authorised reform or transformation efforts. The author's goal is to gauge the lasting power of the rights paradigm by investigating its effects in the margins of property law and of society, by establishing the actual efficacy and power of reformist or transformative anti-eviction policies and legislation aimed at the protection of marginalised and weak land users and occupiers in areas such as landlord-tenant law, eviction of unlawful occupiers of land and other restrictions on the landowner's power to enforce a stronger right to exclusive possession. Ultimately the book's aim is to explore the possibility of opening up theoretical space where justice-inspired changes to (or transformation of) the extant property regime can be imagined and discussed more or less fruitfully from an unusual perspective, a perspective from the margins which is valuable for any theoretical consideration or discussion of property.