The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) is the highest court of appeal for certain British territories and Commonwealth countries. Established on 13 August 1833 to hear appeals formerly heard by the King-in-Council, the Privy Council formerly acted as the court of last resort for the entire British Empire, and continues to act as the highest court of appeal for several independent Commonwealth nations, the Crown Dependencies, and the British Overseas Territories.
A bill of attainder is an act of a legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them, often without a trial. As with attainder resulting from the normal judicial process, the effect of such a bill is to nullify the targeted person's civil rights, most notably the right to own property, the right to a title of nobility, and, in at least the original usage, the right to life itself. Bills of attainder passed in Parliament by Henry VIII on 29 January 1542 resulted in the executions of a number of notable historical figures.
Constitutionality is the condition of acting in accordance with an applicable constitution; the status of a law, a procedure, or an act's accordance with the laws or guidelines set forth in the applicable constitution. When one of these directly violates the constitution, it is unconstitutional. All the rest are considered constitutional until challenged and declared otherwise, typically by courts through judicial review.
The Constitutional Court of South Africa is a supreme constitutional court established by the Constitution of South Africa. It was originally the final appellate court for constitutional matters. Since the enactment of the Superior Courts Act in 2013, the Constitutional Court has jurisdiction to hear any matter if it is in the interests of justice for it to do so.
Kable v Director of Public Prosecutions for NSW, was a significant case decided in the High Court of Australia regarding the independence of the judiciary under the Constitution of Australia.
The Supreme Court of Japan, located in Hayabusachō, Chiyoda, Tokyo, is the highest court in Japan. It has ultimate judicial authority to interpret the Japanese constitution and decide questions of national law. It has the power of judicial review; that is, it can declare Acts of the National Diet, local assemblies, and administrative actions, to be unconstitutional.
In the United States, judicial review is the ability of a court to examine and decide if a statute, treaty or administrative regulation contradicts or violates the provisions of existing law, a State Constitution, or ultimately the United States Constitution. While the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly define a power of judicial review, the authority for judicial review in the United States has been inferred from the structure, provisions, and history of the Constitution.
The supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in many legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and highcourt of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of a supreme court are not subject to further review by any other court. Supreme courts typically function primarily as appellate courts, hearing appeals from decisions of lower trial courts, or from intermediate-level appellate courts.
South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301 (1966), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court rejected a challenge from the state of South Carolina to the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required that some states submit changes in election districts to the Attorney General of the United States. The preclearance provisions were ruled constitutional and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enforced in full.
National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and Another v Minister of Justice and Others is a decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa which struck down the laws prohibiting consensual sexual activities between men. Basing its decision on the Bill of Rights in the Constitution – and in particular its explicit prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation – the court unanimously ruled that the crime of sodomy, as well as various other related provisions of the criminal law, were unconstitutional and therefore invalid.
School corporal punishment refers to inflicting deliberate physical and emotional pain or discomfort in response to undesired behavior by students in schools. It often involves striking the student either across the buttocks or palms of their hands with a tool such as a rattan cane, wooden paddle, slipper, leather strap or wooden yardstick. Less commonly, it could also include spanking or smacking the student with the open hand, especially at the primary school and junior secondary school levels.
S v Makwanyane and Another was a landmark 1995 judgement of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. It established that capital punishment was inconsistent with the commitment to human rights expressed in the Interim Constitution. The court's ruling invalidated section 277(1)(a) of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977, which had provided for use of the death penalty, along with any similar provisions in any other law in force in South Africa. The court also forbade the government from carrying out the death sentence on any prisoners awaiting execution, ruling that they should remain in prison until new sentences were imposed. Delivered on 6 June, this was the newly established court's "first politically important and publicly controversial holding."
Geldenhuys v National Director of Public Prosecutions and Others is a decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa which struck down as unconstitutional a law which set the age of consent at 19 for homosexual sex but only 16 for heterosexual sex.
The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1997 is an act of the Parliament of South Africa which dealt with the consequences of the Constitutional Court's ruling in S v Makwanyane in which capital punishment was declared to be unconstitutional. The act repealed the laws allowing for the death penalty and amended various other laws referring to death sentences or capital offences. It also established a procedure by which existing death sentences could be converted to prison sentences, and fixed minimum sentences for certain serious crimes. The act came into force on 13 November 1998, except for the minimum sentencing provisions, which came into force on 1 May 1998.
Section 20A of the Immorality Act, 1957, commonly known as the "men at a party" clause, was a South African law that criminalised all sexual acts between men that occurred in the presence of a third person. The section was enacted by the Immorality Amendment Act, 1969 and remained in force until it was found to be unconstitutional in 1998 by the Constitutional Court in the case of National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality v Minister of Justice.
Christian Education South Africa v Minister of Education is an important case in South African law. It was heard in the Constitutional Court, by Chaskalson P, Langa DP, Goldstone J, Madala J, Mokgoro J, Ngcobo J, O'Regan J, Sachs J, Yacoob J and Cameron AJ, on 4 May 2000, with judgment handed down on 18 August. FG Richings SC appeared for the appellant, and MNS Sithole SC for the respondent.
S v Williams and Others is a decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in which the court ruled that judicial corporal punishment of juveniles is unconstitutional. The decision was taken with respect to five different cases in which six juveniles were convicted by different magistrates and sentenced to receive a "moderate correction" of a number of strokes with a light cane.
South African administrative law is the branch of public law in that country which regulates the legal relations of public authorities, whether with private individuals and organisations or with other public authorities, or better say, in present-day South Africa, which regulates "the activities of bodies that exercise public powers or perform public functions, irrespective of whether those bodies are public authorities in a strict sense." According to the Constitutional Court, administrative law is "an incident of the separation of powers under which the courts regulate and control the exercise of public power by the other branches of government."
A century ago, in Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Co v Johannesburg Town Council, Innes CJ distinguished only three types of judicial review in the South African system:
- review of the decisions of inferior courts;
- the common-law review of decisions of administrative authorities; and
- a "wider" form of statutory review.
