Professor Andrew Hutchison
BA, LLB, LLM, PhD (University of Cape Town)
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9707-3286
Professor Andrew Hutchison is interested in contracting and commercial law. His recent work has included context-focused elements, aimed particularly at inclusion and transformation. (For example: an empirical study of community savings and credit clubs – ‘stokvels’). This has fed into an interest in the law and practices connected with the low-income financial sector (credit, insurance, banking, fintech). Andrew is also interested in how modern forms of commercial activity translate into living Indigenous norms.
From a more doctrinal point of view, Andrew teaches Agency, Insurance, Secured Transactions, Insolvency, and Consumer Credit law to LLB and Commerce students. Andrew began his writing career with a focus on the common law of contract, particularly the role to be given to good faith or fairness in Contract law. Several of Prof Hutchison’s published articles on this topic were cited by the South African Constitutional Court in the Beadica case in June 2020 (see publications list below).
Andrew presented a guest lecture series at the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida in January 2014. He has since then been a research visitor (inter alia) at the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law (Scotland, UK, 2016); the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg, Germany, 2016); Monash University’s Department of Business Law and Taxation (Melbourne, Australia, 2017); and the Faculty of Law at the University of Montreal (Canada, 2020).
Current Teaching
- Commercial Transactions Law (LLB level)
- Business Law II (Commerce students, under-graduate level)
Select Publications
Select recent publications:
- Andrew Hutchison & Dominique Allen ‘Unsecured Lending and the Indigenous Economy in Australia and South Africa’ (2021) 48 Journal of Law and Society 84-105.
- Andrew Hutchison & Franziska Myburgh (eds) Research Handbook on International Commercial Contracts (Edward Elgar, 2020). Co-authored introduction:
- Andrew Hutchison & Franziska Myburgh ‘International Commercial Contracts: Autonomy and Regulation in a Dynamic System of Merchant Law’ 1-10.
- Andrew Hutchison ‘Uncovering Contracting Norms in Khayelitsha Stokvels’ (2020) 52 Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 3-27.
- Andrew Hutchison ‘Good faith in Contract Law: a Uniquely South African Perspective’ (2019) 1 Journal of Commonwealth Law. [Cited by the ZACC in Beadica.]
- Luca Siliquini-Cinelli & Andrew Hutchison (eds) The Constitutional Dimension of Contract Law: A Comparative Analysis (Springer, 2017). Sole-authored chapter contributed:
- Andrew Hutchison ‘The Decolonisation of South African Contract Law: An Argument for Synthesis’ 151-184. [Cited by the ZACC in Beadica.]
- Andrew Hutchison & Nkanyiso Sibanda ‘A Living Customary Law of Commercial Contracting: Some Law-Related Hypotheses’ (2017) 33 SAJHR 380-405.
- Andrew Hutchison ‘A customary insurance law?’ (2017) 29 SA Merc LJ 17-42.
- Andrew Hutchison & Luca Siliquini-Cinelli ‘Beyond Common Law: A Practical View of Contractual Privity in Australia and South Africa’ (2017) 12 Journal of Comparative Law 49-79. [Cited by the ZACC in Beadica.]
- Alistair Price & Andrew Hutchison ‘Judicial review of exercises of contractual power: South Africa’s divergence from the common law tradition’ (2015) 79 Rabels Zeitschrift 822-851. [Cited by the ZACC in Beadica.]