This Makes Sense
Hi all,
Business Day, 27 June 2005 (
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A61008):
I WOULD hazard a guess that Judge Doug Scott, of the Supreme Court of Appeal, is feeling irritated. Handing down judgment in NK vs the safety and security minister last November, he said that the argument of NK’s counsel, Wim Trengove, was not only “without merit” but “borders on the absurd”.
NK appealed and last month Trengove presented precisely the same argument to the Constitutional Court. Judge Kate O’Regan, writing for a unanimous court, endorsed Trengove’s argument and set aside Scott’s ruling. What the appeals court dismissed as “without merit” and “absurd”, the Constitutional Court has just made law. What is going on when two courts, hearing the same case, appear to inhabit different planets?
In March 1999, NK, a 20-year-old woman, found herself stranded about 15km from home in the early hours of the morning. Three on-duty policemen offered to take her home. She got into their car. Instead of taking her home, they gang-raped her and dumped her in the veld.
All three were convicted of rape and kidnapping, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The case concerns whether the safety and security minister is vicariously liable for the crimes of his employees, and thus ought to pay NK damages. The problem is that two rival variations of the common law test to determine vicarious liability have developed over time. Scott chose one, O’Regan the other.
The test Scott chose asks whether the actions of the minister’s employees deviated so far from their assigned duties that they were no longer carrying out the functions to which they were appointed. For Scott, it was an open-and-shut case. Since it cannot be part of the minister’s employees’ jobs to kidnap and rape young women in the early hours of the morning, the minister is not liable.
O’Regan applied a rival test. She asked whether there was a sufficiently close link between the cops’ criminal acts and the purposes and business of their employer. She said that there was, and that the minister was therefore liable. The most interesting aspect of her argument was her interpretation of the words “sufficiently close”. She argued that what “sufficiently close” meant was not just a question of fact, but also of values, specifically the values embodied in the constitution.
Among NK’s constitutional rights was the right “to be free from all forms of violence”. And, as cops, her rapists had a constitutional duty to protect her. That was the normative context of their encounter. “One of the purposes of wearing uniforms,” O’Regan pointed out, “is to make police officers more identifiable to members of the public who find themselves in need of assistance.” NK had “placed her trust in the policemen although she did not know them personally”.
That is why raping her was “sufficiently close” to the business of their employer. In the very act of raping NK, the policemen failed to protect her, which was a constitutionally charged purpose of their work.
But why did Scott choose one test, and O’Regan the other? What is the nature of their disagreement ?
In essence, O’Regan was telling Scott that he cannot keep interpreting the common law as if the constitution does not exist. What NK is entitled to, and what is expected of the police in relation to her, changed when the constitution came into force in 1996. These changes are changes in values and therefore must, if they are to mean anything, reshape interpretations of delict.
Three weeks before its judgment in the NK case, the Constitutional Court overturned another appeal court ruling, this one by Judge Louis Harms. The case was the famous one between Justin Nurse and South African Breweries. It concerned whether Nurse’s T-shirt parodying the Carling Black Label logo was permissible.
Harms dealt with the matter by asking whether Nurse had committed a statutory trademark infringement. His answer was yes. He then asked whether Nurse’s constitutional right to freedom of expression justified the infringement. His answer was no.
When it overturned his ruling, the Constitutional Court argued that Harms got the relationship between statutory and constitutional law wrong. The existence of the right to freedom of expression, it argued, should have shaped his evaluation of trademark infringement in the first place. Constitutional law is not a discrete layer piled on top of statutory law. It gets inside statutory law. Its values reshape the interpretation of statutory law.
As with its disagreement with Scott, the Constitutional Court was telling Harms that he cannot treat the relationship between constitutional and other law as a relationship between oil and water.
‖Steinberg is a freelance writer.