The Dangerous Powers of South Africa's 'Super Appellate Court'.

The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution transformed the Constitutional Court from a specialist in constitutional matters to a generalist appellate court. Following this amendment, the Court has demonstrated ample willingness to accept its newfound role as the super appellate court in all areas of South Africa's law, and the limits supposedly imposed on the Court's jurisdiction by Section 167(3)(b) of the Constitution have developed and evolved through a jurisprudence riddled with inconsistencies. This article briefly illustrates these inconsistencies in support of its main claim, which is that it is problematic that the Court acts as a generalist court of appeal over decisions of specialised courts, especially when those decisions require engagement with complex factual assessments that fall outside the realm of the Court's expertise. To demonstrate this, the Court's jurisprudence and experience is compared in the specialised areas of labour law and competition law. This exercise indicates that in areas where the Court possesses expertise similar to what is statutorily envisaged for the relevant specialist courts, such as labour law, it has contributed positive developments that have given content to constitutional rights. On the other hand, the Court's jurisprudence in competition law is a disturbing indication of the shortcomings of the present system in terms of which the Court, without acknowledging its limited competition expertise, has overturned expert factual and economic findings of the competition courts. In the process, this has created uncertainty and undermined the legislative intent of the Competition Act 89 of 1998. This conundrum needs to be remedied through deliberate interventions to enhance the Court's competition expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]