The University of Michigan, the University of Michigan Law School, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will sponsor a symposium, “Constitution-Making in South Africa,” organized by the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, on March 21 and 22, 1997. The symposium will bring together leading constitutional scholars, legal practitioners, jurists, and public officials from South Africa and other nations to explore the continuing challenges of constitution-making in post-apartheid South Africa. In addition, symposium participants will examine the lessons South Africa’s experience may hold for other emerging democracies, especially those beset by racial and ethnic strife, and the questions that constitution-making in South Africa poses for more established democracies.

Constitution-making in South Africa
Less than three years ago South Africa held elections that marked the end of apartheid and the end to the political exclusion on racial grounds of South Africa’s majority population. Now a new South Africa is making a remarkably ordered transition to constitutional democracy. On Dec. 10, 1996, President Nelson Mandela signed South Africa’s Constitution after its certification by the Constitutional Court only weeks before. The negotiators who fashioned the Constitution, the scholars who will analyze it, and the practitioners who will interpret and implement it have had little opportunity to reflect upon the constitution-making process or the Constitution itself. For many, this symposium will provide one of their earliest opportunities to examine the experience so far and to look critically at their ongoing constitutional and democratic enterprise.

Implications for other emerging democracies
The South African experience has important implications for nations across Africa and across the globe, especially nations torn by racial and ethnic conflict. A decade ago, the obstacles to a peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa seemed insurmountable. Now South Africa’s remarkable success in making an orderly transition to constitutional democracy may make other nations less reticent to embark upon similar journeys.

A better understanding of how South Africa’s constitution-makers have overcome the obstacles that they faced may advance other efforts at national re-creation. In particular, understanding how South Africa has addressed those questions that every emerging democracy must face would facilitate those nations' transitions. How does a nation go about the process of making a constitution? How do ethnic groups or other existing political factions arrive at decisions about sharing power? How does a nation divide authority between disparate regions, each controlled by a different racial or ethnic group, and a central government in which one of these groups might dominate all others? What rights of citizens (and of groups) should a constitution guarantee? What form should representative government take and how should the nation elect that government? What powers of constitutional review should an independent judiciary have? How should the nation address past governmental abuses? This symposium will examine how South Africa has addressed these issues and will provide opportunities to critique the South African solutions through the experiences of other democratic nations. Such discussions also will probe why different nations have arrived at vastly different conceptions of democracy and tremendously diverse forms of democratic institutions.

Questions for established democracies
In making the Constitution, South Africans looked to, critiqued, and modified the constitutional blueprints drawn up and implemented by relatively more established democracies such as the United States, Canada, Japan, India, and the nations of Europe. These insights and the varied democratic and constitutional forms they fostered may prompt reflection in more established democracies about those nations’ own constitutional frameworks and assumptions. Should a bill of rights include economic and social rights? How effective are the mechanisms in the constitutions of established democracies in resolving conflicts among ethnic, racial, or other factions? As some established democracies become more ethnically diverse, do more proportional systems of representation improve governance or lead to a breakdown in commonly held political values that undermines governance? What might result if more established democracies were to adjust their own democratic mechanisms?

SYMPOSIUM FORMAT

The symposium will be a working conference both providing invited participants opportunities to wrestle with the questions raised above and providing observers opportunities to follow these discussions and engage the invited participants. Symposium forums will include roundtable discussions, panel presentations, speakers, a moot South African court, films, and a banquet with a keynote speaker.

In addition, symposium organizers are making plans to Webcast the audio portion of the proceedings over the World Wide Web and to use the World Wide Web's interactive capabilities to allow those who cannot attend the symposium in person nonetheless to engage the symposium’s invited participants and others in attendance. Check this website’s On-line Public Forum and Audio Resources pages for information on how to participate in the conference over the Web.

For additional information about the symposium or the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, please check this site periodically, email Maureen Bishop or contact the Journal at (734) 763-4421.