Читать книгу South African Law - François Smuts - Страница 4

This is not a book for lawyers. You won’t find dry explanations of the legal principles relating to a specific topic here. And you will notice that it is not written in the funereal style of legal textbooks, because my aim in writing this book is not to make a name for myself as an academic. (I would never be able to make up all those lectures I missed at university.) In any event, once I started practising law, I learnt that most of the legal problems facing the average person do not involve subtle distinctions or complicated arguments. For that reason, the purpose of this book is to give ordinary people a basic “legal toolbox” that will enable them to understand the workings of the law and to take simple preventative legal action. Most of the problems about which I am consulted in my practice could be avoided by taking a few precautionary measures. For example, by putting a contract in writing and knowing what to insert in that contract; by knowing the correct procedure to follow before dismissing an employee; or by remembering to take a few photographs on your cellphone after a car accident.

This is therefore a book for the layperson. I am assuming that you possess some ability to think rationally, but I do not expect you to have a university qualification in logic in order to understand this book. I do not refer to court cases, except if it is a juicy story or if the case illustrates an important point. I use Latin only when it is interesting (or if I find it particularly poetic) and in such cases, I also say what I mean in plain English. I do not quote from textbooks, although at the end of this book I do provide a list of textbooks you can refer to if you want to know more about something I have touched on.

This book is not intended to be comprehensive or very detailed. So you will not find anything here about aviation law, mining law or something like the exceptio non adempleti contractus or the Turquand rule. I have rather tried to summarise those legal topics that the lay reader is likely to encounter.

But isn’t a little knowledge of the law a dangerous thing? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the same way that it is dangerous to start fiddling with the engine of your car if you aren’t qualified to do so. No, in the same way that it isn’t dangerous to check that there is water in the radiator, oil in the engine and petrol in the tank before you set out on a journey. Where does one draw the line between the two? That is something that you must decide for yourself, but I hope that this book will assist you in making that decision.