Over time there have been a lot of noise in the “Zuma-case” commentary, from some arrogant uneducated peeps, to some other inciting cartoonists who caused quite an uproar, to “the-guy-sitting-next-to-me-on-the-plane-on-Friday”.

The history to the case is quite long and involved, with numerous applications all over the world…

During all of this time, a large number of commentators where very, nay extremely, negative and sometimes even downright dismissive about the impartiality and reliability of the courts’ integrity. Some these comments included that if the court doesn’t find in Zuma’s favour, there will be mass picketing (YCL’s Mashilo) or that there will be people willing to kill for Zuma (ANCYL’s Malema).

In essence, a number of Zuma’s staunch supporters went out from the premise that the judiciary cannot be trusted to give the “correct” judgment.

Finally, on Friday past, Nicholson J, handed down his judgment in Zuma’s application in having the NPA’s prosecution scrapped because of policital interference in the advancement of the prosecution. Zuma (and his supporters) were vindicated and the prosecution of Zuma was striked.

What br!ghtshark fails to understand is how these supporters of Zuma, whom were all so disbelieving of the indepedence of the judiciary, can now so easily and triumphantly claim this judgment as a “victory” to be celebrated. If the judiciary was as unreliable as Zuma’s supporters made it out to be, this same logic should be applied to the final “victorius” judgment handed down by Nicholson J and should this judgment be viewed with much circumspect, but that is probably the illogical game of politicians and their antics.

—> A fully searchable e-library for law journals, etc (http://tinyurl.com/2c2tnh)

—> A fully searchable database of all judgments from the Constitutional Court (http://tinyurl.com/2dok3n)

And the most impressive: a RSS feed for the court roll and judgments!

—> Judgments = http://www.vivid.co.za/concourtrss/judgementfeed
—> Court Roll = http://www.vivid.co.za/concourtrss/courtrollfeed

Well done I say!

Because of historic reasons, South Africa’s legal system is not entirely codified but in this age of information sharing and collaborative effort, it may just become easier for the general public to lay their hands on the law.

The platform for this, is the well-known wiki-format. According to wikipedia (how very fitting!), a wiki is defined as follows:

“(n) A collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it.”

JurisPedia (http://en.jurispedia.org/index.php/South_Africa) is a site that aims to use the wiki-platform to make the law more easily accessible for all. The idea is that lawyers and law professors (and law students) contribute to the page. At this stage, only one topic has been covered, being “An Introduction to the Law of Contract”. Hopefully this will be expanded on soon.

One way of making the law more accessible to all would be for the Law Societies to recognise contributions to the site as legitimate pro-bono work (currently only the Cape Law Society’s members have to provide pro bono services (24 hours per year), with the Law Society of the Free State to follow soon). Urge your local law society to embrace the modern age and recognise JurisPedia as a legitimate pro bono activity.