Acknowledgements
Books, it seems, are like rolls of sticky tape: their owners often find themselves surprisingly attached to them, but until finished they are mostly an exercise in trying to find the end. And once finished, it takes a special kind of forensically archeaological mind to have much interest in going back to identify the precise point where they began. This book may have begun in Marius Pieterse’s course on Human Rights at Wits Law School in 2006, or while writing for Thaddeus Metz in the Wits philosophy department the following year, or during my time as a law clerk to Justice Johann van der Westhuizen at South Africa’s Constitutional Court the year after that, or indeeed after my arrival at Yale Law School a year later still. I’m not sure: I am, however, deeply grateful to all four.
It was, at least, at YLS that it took shape, and this book is owed above all to that institution and its generosity, of academic spirit and other things. It may be increasingly customary to be indebted to US law schools, but my debts are of the nicest kind. I owe them to the graduate programs office, to its mother, Maria Dino, its deans Toni Davis and her successor Gordon Silverstein, and to Steph D’Ambrose and Caroline Curtis; to Dean Robert Post; and to Yale’s extraordinary librarians, not least for permitting me to check out portions of their South African collections sufficiently large to require returning by incredulous taxi. I owe them to teachers at YLS, including Akhil Amar, the late Robert Burt, Daniel Bonilla, Dieter Grimm, Frank Iacobucci, John Langbein, Jerry Mashaw, Nick Parrillo, Susan Rose-Ackerman, and Jim Silk, who although not directly involved in this book offered encouragement and afforded me, in various ways, the invaluable opportunity to watch them at work. I owe them to Ian Shapiro of Yale’s Political Science department, who served on my doctoral committee and offered generous support and incisive criticism, and to my friends and colleagues in the Yale graduate community who had the misfortune to have parts of this book and, worse still, parts since deleted from this book, bounced off them, occasionally with their consent. And I owe them to Bruce Ackerman, whose scholarly interest in the breadth and richness of constitutional real life first made me want to go to Yale, who I was to discover possessed kindness to match as supervisor to the thesis on which this book is based, and who taught me too to disagree, although it is possible that there at least he was casting for type.
Parts of my time at Yale were supported by the Fulbright program and by South Africa’s Skye Foundation; my thanks to Mareka Chabedi, Neville Passmore, and to the private benefactors and US tax-payers who fund these scholarships for their extraordinary beneficence. Parts of this book were written, post-Yale, during time at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. I am grateful to the directors of the former, Anne Peters and Arnim von Bogdandy who extended my invitation, and of the latter, Erika de Wet and Christof Heyns, and to the people of both institutions. This book has also benefitted enormously from other scholars and observers, inside South Africa and out, who have offered me help and support on this and other projects along the way, including David Bilchitz, Michael Bishop, Steve Ellmann, Heinz Klug, Gilbert Marcus, Alistair Price, Ngwako Raboshakga, Theunis Roux, who graciously shared with me an earlier manuscript of his Politics of Principle, Wojciech Sadurski, Kristen Stilt, Mia Swart, Alexei Trochev, Dave Watson, Emma Webber, Stu Woolman and two annoymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press. I am also grateful to Finola O’Sullivan and the staff at Cambridge University Press, and to the editors of this series, David Dyzenhaus, who first showed an interest in this project, and Adam Tomkins.
Book acknowledgements are necessary because vital scaffolding is otherwise invisible in the finished construction; for the unfinished project that is this book’s author, the scaffolding remains in place, notwithstanding the dust and occasional unannounced buckets of cement. An array of teachers, co-clerks, colleagues, conference attendees and friends, over an array of beverages, have been kind enough to tell me when they thought I was doing something right, when I was definitely doing something wrong, and when I might be missing out on something interesting and useful, a tangle of conversations that adds up, I think, to an education. Some timbers have been especially durable: Mieke Krynauw, conversations with whom represent another candidate for this book’s beginning; Abby and Simon Marcus, curators of cities; David and Rachel Fowkes, purveyors of banter and bánh mì, whom I assure that any dreadful puns in the book are accidental; and the rest of my impressively expanding family, support structure from the beginning. None has been around longer than my parents: no-one did more to provision this particular journey of a thousand miles, and while it may be that such journeys begin with a single step, someone was holding both my doubtless chubby hands when I took it. And no-one spent more time living with this book than Michaela Hailbronner, there from beginning to end, who first wrote down its title in the snow on the bonnet of a blue Honda Civic, owner unknown, at the start of a New Haven winter on Bradley Street. Writing books side by side in shared rooms on three continents may not be the most efficient dating strategy for picking a partner for life, but it is one I would highly recommend. To her, now my wife and mother to a small Edward very effectively distracting me from these acknowledgements, this book is dedicated.
