Fedsure Life Assurance and nine other property owners in Johannesburg took the Constitutional Court to task over rates increases in 1998, and that single dispute still shapes how capital tests state power in South Africa. A Daily Maverick feature marking 30 years since the signing of the Constitution, published at https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-11-11-from-equal-rights-to-the-death-penalty-seven-constitutional-court-judgments-that-shaped-sa/, examines seven judgments that defined the court’s role, several of them with direct consequences for markets, investors and the cost of doing business.
The case arrived while Johannesburg was still absorbing the post-apartheid merger of previously divided municipalities and grappling with deep inequalities in services. The court found the rates lawful. But the judgment reached further than what property owners had to pay: it established that government institutions and public officials could only exercise powers given to them by law, and had to stay within those limits. That principle of legality has since underpinned challenges to decisions by public officials, including members of the executive, giving investors and operators a judicial route to test whether a president, minister, municipality or other public body had the legal authority for a decision and used it lawfully.
Professor Danwood Chirwa of the University of Cape Town said the doctrine was later extended to the review of executive powers, calling it arguably a South African innovation and a significant advance in administrative law that laid the foundation for a robust system of public accountability in which courts play an important role.
The court has also shaped the economics of public health. In 2002, at the height of the HIV/Aids epidemic, it ordered the government to remove restrictions on nevirapine, a drug that reduces the risk of mothers passing HIV to their babies, after the Treatment Action Campaign argued the policy violated the right to healthcare. Lawson Naidoo, Executive Secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, said the judgment saved thousands of lives by making preventive treatment available to pregnant mothers and helped South Africa roll out probably one of the largest HIV treatment programmes in the world, a success whose policy and programme consequences continue today.
Housing policy, and with it the regulatory environment for property and development, was reshaped by the 2000 Grootboom judgment. Irene Grootboom and hundreds of other adults and children, living in poor conditions in the Wallacedene informal settlement in the Western Cape, had been evicted after moving onto nearby private land while waiting for low-cost housing. The court found the state’s housing programme was failing people in desperate need and ordered it to provide for those facing a housing crisis. Mbekezeli Benjamin of Judges Matter noted that although Grootboom died in 2008 still living in a shack, the judgment led to a revision of the National Housing Code and protection for millions of people in informal settlements, setting the standard for the state’s obligation to give content to socioeconomic rights.
Meanwhile, accountability cases have carried their own economic weight. The EFF litigation tested presidential power across a decade, from the 2016 Nkandla judgment, which found former president Jacob Zuma had failed to uphold the Constitution by not complying with the Public Protector’s remedial action, to EFF III, which set aside the National Assembly’s decision not to refer the Phala Phala panel report on President Cyril Ramaphosa to an impeachment committee. Benjamin argued these judgments set in motion the events that led to Zuma’s resignation and now require Ramaphosa to account to Parliament, a vital check as democratic backsliding erodes accountability mechanisms in countries like America, Hungary and the Philippines.
The 2011 Glenister judgment carries a quieter commercial logic of its own. Prompted by businessman Hugh Glenister’s challenge to the disbanding of the Scorpions, it established that the state has a constitutional duty to maintain an adequately independent body to investigate corruption, forcing Parliament to amend the law governing the Hawks. Naidoo said such judgments provided constitutional guardrails that prevented the worst excesses of the State Capture years, when the capacity of law enforcement to investigate powerful people came under scrutiny, a period whose costs to institutions and markets were considerable.
The court’s very first case, the 1995 Makwanyane judgment abolishing the death penalty, signalled to investors and the world the kind of legal system the new democracy would run: one anchored in human dignity and predictable rights protection, a foundation on which commercial confidence in South African courts has been built. Three decades on, the open question is whether that foundation can hold as the political and economic pressures testing the country’s institutions continue to mount.