Contemporary Issues in Law and the Society: Reflections from South Africa and Selected Jurisdictions

The intricate framework of a constantly evolving corpus of laws, rules, and principles characterises the legal education and profession in the twenty-first century. Gone are the days of studying the law from a conventional doctrinal point of view. In the contemporary society, legal practice and education extend beyond other disciplines that are not specifically related to law. In this context, 21st-century legal educators should be adaptable in order to map out the course that society and the law should take in a reasonable and realistic manner. Law teachers in the twenty-first century must be innovative and address complex societal issues with the goal of offering practical and/or realistic solutions. It is unequivocal that the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions (4IR and 5IR) have given rise to a number of previously unheard-of legal multifaceted socio-legal issues which countries in the twenty-first century have to address. Challenges brought about by globalisation, technological innovation, and related social changes that follow from these developments should prompt law teachers to address these challenges by moving beyond doctrinal to non-doctrinal discourses. It is in this framework that the 2024 Southern African Law Teachers Conference, which took place in South Africa, was conducted. This edited book includes select contributions from the 2024 Southern Africa Law Teachers on discourses related to complex legal issues, including human rights, law and society, constitutional law, and legal education and AI. The authors of the chapters tackle a wide range of intricate legal matters in a way that captures society’s fluidity and the ever-evolving recurrent challenges. The authors of respective chapters examine a few legal and modern socio-legal topics as well as difficulties that arise in legal practice and education. The book’s implicit message is to ensure that lawyers and legal educators should not have a fixation on traditional black-letter legal issues but must rather explore how the law interacts with non-traditional legal challenges in order to advance workable solutions to society’s complex legal and societal issues.