Inequality and the role of the law
- Wits University
Wits School of Law launches Professor Cathi Albertyn’s new book: Equality Law and Transformation in South Africa (Juta and Co, 2026).
Inequality is overwhelming in South Africa - yet the South African Constitution guarantees the achievement of equality for all. Is there a role for the Constitution and for law in challenging inequality, and thereby shrinking the persistent gap between the constitutional promise and the reality?
Professor Cathi Albertyn’s new book, Equality Law and Transformation in South Africa (Juta and Co, 2026), seeks to answer that question across a broad sweep of history, theory and the equality jurisprudence of the South African Constitutional Court. In doing so, it examines the contours of inclusion and exclusion produced by different political and legal ideas of equality over the years and in the courts today, thus seeking to understand the transformative potential and hard realities of using equality law to address inequality.
At the launch, Albertyn, the NRF SARChI Chair in Equality Law and Social Justice at the School of Law, was joined by Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, SC and acting justice in the Constitutional Court, as well as Dr Thandi Matthews of the Wits School of Governance.
Ngcukaitobi set the scene by speaking of the deep history of racial inequality in South Africa and the promise of the Constitution in addressing this past. This was followed by a lively and wide-ranging conversation with Albertyn and Ngcukaitobi facilitated by Dr Thandi Matthews.
The book (available in soft cover and e-book) can be purchased from