This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Not every South African legal scholar who has written about ubuntu's place in constitutional law agrees that a concept this open-ended belongs in constitutional adjudication at all. The doctrine's defenders and its skeptics broadly agree on what ubuntu did in S v Makwanyane and in the cases that followed it, most notably Port Elizabeth Municipality v Various Occupiers (2004), where the Constitutional Court invoked ubuntu as, in its own words, the underlying motif of the Bill of Rights. Where they part ways is on whether a word this hard to pin down can supply a court with a workable legal standard.
The vagueness objection is a familiar one to any lawyer skeptical of open-textured principles. The commentator Eusebius McKaiser has called ubuntu a terribly opaque notion, one that leaves a judge's ruling depending, as he put it, on what the judge had for breakfast, and even Constitutional Court Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, one of ubuntu's own judicial champions, has conceded that the concept can only be grasped on a know it when I see it basis. The underlying worry is that a word like ubuntu, drawn from Nguni and cognate Southern African languages, does not on its own supply the precision a judge needs to reach, and publicly justify, one particular outcome over another in a hard case.
The philosopher Thaddeus Metz, writing in the African Human Rights Law Journal, has done more than almost anyone to answer that objection rather than concede it. Metz constructs a specific ethical principle out of ubuntu, centered on honoring communal relationships of identity and solidarity, and argues that this philosophical interpretation is not vulnerable to the vagueness, collectivism and anachronism objections leveled against looser uses of the word. He concludes that all three criticisms, read against his own precise version of ubuntu, have been successfully rebutted. This atlas records the disagreement rather than resolving it: whether Metz's more rigorous ubuntu can bear the doctrinal weight the Constitutional Court has periodically placed on the looser version of the concept remains genuinely open among the scholars who study it most closely.