Room 5.40 - Kramer Law Building

Dan Mafora is a Lecturer in the Department of Public Law. He specialises in constitutional law, administrative law and constitutional theory. His other research interests include jurisprudence, legal theory, legal history and corporate law. He is a contributing author to South African Constitutional Law (Brickhill et al, eds), the Yearbook of South African Law and Juta’s Quarterly Review (with Jason Brickhill). He is also the author of Capture in the Court: In Defence of Judges and the Constitution (Tafelberg, 2023).
He’s the former senior researcher at the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC) and completed his articles of clerkship at DLA Piper SA with rotations in the commercial, mergers and acquisitions, and banking and finance departments. He was a law clerk to Justice Mbuyiseli R. Madlanga at the Constitutional Court in 2018. He holds an LLB from the University of Pretoria and an LLM from the University of Cape Town (with distinction). Dan is open to supervising postgraduate students working in areas of law aligned with his research interests. He publishes a blog on matters constitutional on Substack.

Publications

'Taming the Hydra state: Against implied powers and reasoning by implication in South African law' (2026) 47 Statute Law Review (forthcoming)

'Courts as Sites of Political Contestation: A South African Perspective' (with Sfiso Benard Nxumalo) in N Reayat and H O. Yusuf (eds) Constitutionalism in Africa and Beyond: Challenges and Opportunities (2025) 127 Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice 199-237 (available here)

'Whose Constitutional Jurisdiction is It Anyway? Courts of a Similar Status to the High Court and Other Tribunal' (2023) 13 Constitutional Court Review 327-362 (available here)

  View full CV