
Published online:
22 March 2012
Published in print:
07 November 1996
Online ISBN:
9780191682162
Print ISBN:
9780198260875
Contents
Cite
'Preface', in Reinhard Zimmermann, and Daniel Visser (eds), Southern Cross: Civil Law and Common Law in South Africa (Oxford , 1996; online edn, Oxford Academic, 22 Mar. 2012), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198260875.002.0004, accessed 12 May 2025.
Extract
‘Of all the constellations that stud the sky of the Southern hemisphere, there is none that more strikes a stranger than the Southern Cross’ (). Equally striking for the stranger is the cross between civil law and common law as it exists today in Southern Africa. The Dutch settlers of the 17th century brought with them the European ius commune to the Cape of Good Hope; and the British judges, originally sent out to the 19th century Colony to ‘measure out a scanty justice to squalid savages’ (cf. (1992) 109 SALJ 301) eventually managed to graft English concepts, rules and precedents upon the law of Voet and Vinnius. South African private law has thus been shaped by the vicissitudes of European colonial ambitions and their local aftermath; but, in the process, it has acquired a composite character—an identity as striking and distinctive as the constellation on the Southern sky.
Philip Henry Gosse, The Oceans, London, 1849, p. 178
Subject
History of Law
Collection:
Oxford Scholarship Online
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