Once a pale reflection of the English common law, judicial review in South African administrative law has been thoroughly indigenised as a result of both constitutionalisation and codification. The South African model has indeed come to be regarded as an archetype of constitutionalised judicial review. Judicial review was and remains the most dominant safeguard in South African public law. The chapter describes this and other significant features of the system both before and after 1994. It goes on to explain how the rights to just administrative action and the legislation giving effect to them, the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act 3 of 2000, have been a guiding light for a number of other jurisdictions over the last two decades. Finally, the chapter points to areas in which English cases and doctrines have been and continue to be relied on by the South African courts in administrative law. Remarkably, and notwithstanding the thorough indigenisation depicted here, the connection with English administrative law is still quite obvious and probably always will be.

The core function of the judiciary in any jurisdiction, it has been suggested, consists in the ‘determination of matters in court by the delivery of judgments enforceable by process of law’. Chapter 8 of the South African Constitution affirms this view by associating ‘judicial’ matters with the business of the courts. Section 165(1) of the Constitution vests the ‘judicial authority of the Republic’ in ‘the courts’, and s. 166 indicates that the ‘judicial system’ consists of the various courts. Tellingly, too, ss. 174 and 175 deal with the appointment of judges and acting judges not in the abstract but as members of particular courts.

Such provisions add colour to the concept of judicial functions, but without necessarily preventing judges from undertaking non-judicial functions in addition to their core activities. South African judges have in fact always performed extraneous functions, and in this country there is a long and notable tradition of depending on judges to chair governmental commissions of inquiry – often, if erroneously, referred to as ‘judicial commissions’.