Bengwenyama Minerals (Pty) Ltd v Genorah Resources (Pty) Ltd: Johan Froneman, the Transformation of Property Law and the Virtue of Small Things
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17159/1727-3781/2024/v27i0a16938Keywords:
property law, democratisation, transformation;, "expropriation without compensation", state custodianship of land, ownershipAbstract
In this article in honour of Justice Johan Froneman, I consider an early judgment of his on the Constitutional Court, Bengwenyama Minerals (Pty) Ltd v Genorah Resources (Pty) Ltd 2011 4 SA 113 (CC). I read the case as an important property law judgment, showing already at an early stage in the Court's jurisprudence strong traces of a transformative vision of property law developed by Van der Walt, Ngcukaitobi and Wilson, among others that I describe as a democratised property law. I show how the three pillars of this approach (the move from objects to objectives; the opening up of the canon of recognised property interests; and the move from property to propriety) all feature in Froneman J's Bengwenyama judgment. On this basis I then conclude by making the point that real transformation of property law derives much more from the kinds of "small moves" made by Froneman J in Bengwenyama than from the grand-scale solutions such as "expropriation without compensation" or state custodianship of land that have dominated political imagination over the past several years.
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Albutt v Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation 2010 3 SA 293 (CC)
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Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996
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