“The dream of justice”

Abstract

In the piece below the author, inspired by David Scott (Stuart Hall 2017), writes a letter to the late Drucilla Cornell. She starts off by drawing on Scott’s invocation of “An ethics of receptive generosity” in relation to Hall and attributes such ethics also to Cornell. Cornell, did not only give but also knew how to receive from others. Her engagement with her own context, the different legal theoretical positions in the US legal academy at the time, in The Philosophy of the Limit (Cornell 1992) is unpacked and also used as a way for the author to reflect on the different perspectives on the constitution in South Africa. The author regards Cornell’s renaming of deconstruction to the “philosophy of the limit” and its implications for legal interpretation, as well as her framing of ethical feminism as foundational to a critical jurisprudence, and a feminist jurisprudence, a jurisprudence that is feminist. She focuses on Cornell’s work on/ in South Africa, her view of revolution and her “rethinking of ethical feminism through ubuntu”.