Legal Eye for the Layperson

It is not very often an attorney comes out and admits being helpless against a certain fight for a noble cause. With the appropriate resources, an attorney ( in theory ) should be able to fight the battle of David versus Goliath (David being the attorney). There are instances where, admittedly or not, attorneys are roped in achieving their final goals. Today marks this day for me. The fight is not yet over but the tragic finish line is imminent. The story begins with two little African children, who both had difficult births and infancy development. These two children are full siblings. Let's call the first-born Mather and the second-born Arthur. Mather is eighteen months older than Arthur but Arthur was born HIV positive. Before long, they were declared as wards of the State and eventually became orphans. Marher is moved to a small baby sanctuary under the care of a particular house mother (let's call her Mother Hen). She identifies a suitable candidate for this child to ...

Yesterday afternoon, on my way back home from work, I heard about an incident on the radio. It was casually announced that a 17-year old teenager named Anene Booysen was "viciously" raped and mutilated in her home town of Bredasdorp, Western Cape, South Africa. Before she passed away, she managed to name her ex-boyfriend as one of the rapists. It would appear, as there were many suspects, that she was gang-raped. At this point, two men had been arrested and will be brought before court next week. After hearing this  announcement, the country was up in arms and the African National Congress (ANC) Women's League commenced intense political action against rape, demanding that more awareness and "harsher punishments" to be handed down by the courts for such crimes. LEAD SA, a 94.7 initiative, also commenced public action. The two statistics that frightened me the most were announced as well and these were: One in every three women in South Africa will be ra...

By its very nature, the concept of maintenance should be quite easy to ascertain and acquire in law. A parent of a child is (especially, for the purposes of law, financially ) duty-bound and legally bound to support his or her child, whether natural or adopted parent. In a similar fashion, the law has created a set of reciprocal obligations between parents and children: children are equally bound to support their parents as parents are to support their children. In South Africa, especially because of,  inter alia , the high birth rare, the law has been geared with a fool-proof Maintenance Act , Regulations, and Court. This is primarily because the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa ("the Constitution") is the highest law in the land and therefore equality before the law is an entrenched value in respect of all law created and regulating the country. However, the Maintenance system, particularly in Gauteng, is a system which is now essentially defunct: it ...