Roman-Dutch Law And The Influence Of English Law

The British took the Cape government, administration and the judicial organisation and re-shaped it along
English lines. English civil and criminal procedures were replacing outdated forms of procedure and the
Cape Evidence Ordinance 72 of 1830 introduced the British law of evidence in 1830. Because the world of trade and commerce was dominated by the British and intensified by the British trade between Great
Britain and the Cape, the consequent application of English Commercial customs, English documents and contracts led to the introduction of English mercantile law. The industrial revolution was well under way in England and the age of trade and technology was starting. English judges and advocates looked to English law for inspiration where Dutch law gave no answers.

The reason for this is that many judges and lawyers received their initial legal education at English Universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. They were therefore mainly acquainted with English law. They found the application of the old authorities on Roman-Dutch law which were written in either Latin or Dutch problematic.
The influence of English law provoked a debate among South African jurists and they split into two camps being the modernists and the purists. The modernist respected Roman-Dutch law, and regarded it as the basis of the South African common law, but they also realised that the law had to develop and adapt in order to suit modern South African demands.
The mouthpiece of the modernists was the South African Law Journal (SALJ). The purists on the other hand considered the modernists as contaminators of Roman-Dutch law. They tried as far as possible to get rid of the English influences and their mouthpiece was the Tydskrif vir Hedendaagse RomeinsHollandse
Reg (THRHR). Today the SALJ and THRHR can no longer be labelled the mouthpiece of any specific group or school of thought because the whole debate has ceased and it is now