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Stuck in legal limbo: a case study of migrants accessing the law in Johannesburg
Date
2014-11-11
Authors
Lambson, Sydney Vivian
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Abstract
This study looks at the experiences of migrants accessing notions of justice at the Wits Law
Clinic, the pro-bono public interest law clinic of the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa. This study explores the way migrants engage with public
interest law in the light of an overwhelming adversarial and threatening experience of the
law. The law in the form of state law and its powers embodied in law enforcers and petty
bureaucrats is mainly used against them and confines them to a ‘state of bare life’. One could
therefore expect that this compels migrants to keep their heads down and avoid any form of
formalization, and instead reverting to a total reliance on informal survival strategies. This
study however shows that migrants retain a strong faith in the law and draw a huge sense of
hope from the services they receive from the Wits Law Clinic – even though the only action
that is sometimes taking place is the endless writing of letters. But it appears that the
reduction of the law to absolutely mundane bureaucratic activity still holds enough symbolic
power of giving migrants a sense of moving closer towards the promise of justice, which the
law also holds, even though it might be over and over deferred.