The volume’s Introduction is divided into four parts. It begins by setting out the analytical framework animating this volume, namely “juristocratic reckoning," which builds on, yet critically modifies and reappropriates, Ran Hirschl’s (2004) notion of “juristocracy” in order to capture a broader process of transformation through which law and legal categories are invested with unusual weight and responsibility beyond their more conventional carrying capacity. Such over-freighting of law typically involves a “dialectics of reckoning,” through which law is first elevated during certain moments in time, which then give way to a second phase, a coming to terms with juristocracy’s failures marked by critique, skepticism, and eventual disenchantment. Within this larger dynamic, certain histories of juristocratic reckoning are imbued with what the Introduction describes as an “iconic indexicality,” in which their supposed historical significance itself enters into the process of juristocratic elevation and then unraveling. Against the backdrop of this conceptual exposition, the Introduction situates Reckoning with Law in Excess in the current conjuncture – an era of crisis and confrontation, characterized by growing debates, within academia and beyond, about the demise of the rule of law. Having located the overall analytical project within different historical, political, and academic contexts, the Introduction then traces the contours of juristocratic reckoning through the diverse and global range of case studies assembled in the volume, including some that are marked by an iconic indexicality and others that are not. It proposes three “taxonomies of reckoning,” which coalesce around concerns with “states of juristocracy,” “alter-legal reckonings,” as well as “juristocracies against the state,” attesting to the persisting centrality – if always contested, variable, and fragmented – of the state form. Last but not least, the Introduction examines the temporality of juristocracy, since viewing the case studies through their various temporalities reinforces the wider point that dialectics of reckoning must be understood through their empirical and historical heterogeneities rather than as exemplars of an abstracted sociolegal category. Revisiting the various case studies, the Introduction shows how the dialectics of juristocratic reckoning are associated with moments, momentums, and mobilizations in the living archives of law that often yield inconclusive or ambiguous results and remain open to multiple interpretations, directions, and futures.

The negotiated South African revolution of the 1990s inaugurated a marked shift toward strong constitutionalism: the post-apartheid Constitution comprised an extensive Bill of Rights, including substantial socioeconomic rights and constitutional duties for far-reaching redistributive measures, and established an independent judiciary under the auspices of a new constitutional (rather than, as before, parliamentary) supremacy. This way, South Africa quickly turned into a paradigmatic case of “juristocracy” (Hirschl 2004) and became imbued with an iconic indexicality for the enormous hopes for transformative justice that came to be vested in the law during the post-cold war era. Based on this progressive Constitution, the government immediately embarked upon a massive land reform in order to address persisting racial inequalities regarding access to and control of the land. Aiming at “putting land rights in the right hands under the rule of law,” as the former minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs put it in 2007 in contradistinction to ongoing extralegal land occupations in neighboring Zimbabwe, South African land reform exemplified a profound belief in “transformative constitutionalism” that was advocated as the solution to many of South Africa’s pressing political concerns. However, growing criticisms of the limited impact and slow pace of South African juristocracy in general and of law-based land reform in particular have substantially altered public discourse over the past decade, revealing a more complex and ambiguous dialectics of reckoning to be at play. Transformative constitutionalism is increasingly also portrayed as being part of the problem – or at least as suffering from “a dis/empowerment paradox” (Mnisi Weeks 2022) – that needs to be overcome in order to finally transform South Africa, which remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, in substantive and meaningful ways. This contested development is paradigmatically exemplified in the recent constitutional amendment process, designed to allow for “expropriation without compensation” in order to fast-track South African land reform, as its advocates claim. This chapter charts the contested terrain of this complex dialectic of juristocratic reckoning in order to evaluate the potentials and pitfalls of a continued project of transformative constitutionalism that increasingly has to operate in an era in which South Africa’s moment of iconic indexicality seems to be passing.