Ownership and Eviction: Constitutional Rights in Private Law

Abstract

* Professor, Department of Public Law, Stellenbosch University. Research for this article was made possible by financial assistance from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Research Foundation (grant number GUN 2050532), Stellenbosch University, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Opinions, conclusions and recommendations expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of these institutions and should not be attributed to them. For parts of the article I relied on sections from three other articles written in the same period: see A J van der Walt, “Property theory and the transformation of property law”; “The Public aspect of private property”; and “Constitutional rights and private-law rules” (all forthcoming). Thanks are due to the participants in seminars at Aberdeen and Edinburgh where the paper was presented, as well as to Greg Alexander, Laura Underkuffler and Hanoch Dagan for extensive, incisive and helpful comments on various drafts of this paper.