Two pieces of legislation are central to the schema of resurgent traditional authority. One, the Communal Land Rights Act, which centralised the authority to administer and allocate land within chiefly structures, has already been declared unconstitutional in its entirety by the Constitutional Court, largely because the procedures followed by Parliament allowed it to circumvent effective public participation. The other is the Traditional Courts Bil.

Traditional courts are a feature of life in rural South Africa. Many function effectively. Many others do not. They hear disputes ranging from the cow that ate the neighbour`s cabbages to the most serious criminal offences (even if they and government officially disclaim any jurisdiction in these matters), and everything in between. As Phathekile Holomisa points out in this volume, these courts are not centralised. Instead, they are layered, drawing legitimacy from complex systems of social recognition and nested authority. As such, the TCB does not formalise existing systems; it creates new ones. We need to ask, as Nomboniso Gasa does in this volume, why this is necessary, and whose interests are served. The debate is one that should engage those concerned with crime and justice in South Africa.

Just a few of the issues that arise from the contributions to this volume: Is it appropriate to deny legal representation in a court that may impose financial penalties (including fines and compensation payments), order that a party to the dispute perform `service without remuneration`, and deprive a person of `any benefits that accrue in terms of customary law and custom` (which would include access to land), all with the ultimate effect of an order made in the magistrates` court? And are these forms of sanction appropriate to such a forum in the first place? Is it acceptable, in a constitutional democracy, to enforce recourse only to traditional courts, to the exclusion of the formal criminal justice system? If traditional courts draw their authority to act from the consensual recognition of their subjects (as many do), why would one need to force a choice of forum through law? And, as Sindiso Mnisi asks in her second contribution to this volume, how should these courts be regulated to best align them with constitutional values?

These are not easy questions and there are no easy answers. However, they cannot be avoided by those concerned with crime and justice. More importantly, they need to be debated by those whom the Bill will directly affect, something that has not happened to date. This volume is a contribution to that debate.