Methodology

The initial phase of the project has focused on developing a user-friendly data collection tool and web-based interactive platform. 

As a pilot, the platform presents data on authorship and agreement rates by and amongst judges of the Constitutional Court, and the constitutional rights or topics covered by the Court's judgments. The period 2010-2019 was selected for the pilot as this coincided with data collection for a parallel research project. 

Topics were identified by the researchers based on general legal subject areas, and were amended or updated as data collection got underway.  There may be topics of interest to some researchers which have not been categorised here as such.  

All rights that featured prominently in the Court's reasoning were captured, including rights that feature prominently in separate judgments, though not in the majority's. Rights that were pleaded by the parties but not discussed in any length by the Court were not included. 

We used the following definitions for judicial agreement: 

• A majority opinion is one that is concurred in by more than half of the quorum and therefore yields the Court's order. 
• A concurrence is a written opinion that concurred fully with the order of the majority. 
• A dissent is a written opinion that disagreed entirely with the order of the majority. 
• A partial agreement is a written opinion that agreed with only part of the order of the majority. 
• A split judgment is for rare cases where the Court's quorum split equally on the result, with the effect that there is no majority judgment. 
• Explanatory judgment is for those cases, also rare, in which a separate judgment was written by the Court not to provide reasons in support of the result but merely to clarify the legal effect of the opinions in the case (for example, to explain how the result is arrived at).

It should be noted that our definitions may differ from that employed by the Court (which began the practice of labelling opinions in 2014). While helpful to readers, the Court's labels do not appear to be based on a consistent classification system.