An easily understood guide to South African Law

Book: Everyone’s Guide to South African Law (4th Edition).

Authors: Adriaan Anderson, Anelia Dodd and Rolien Roos.

Reviewed by: Samantha Keogh.

Review made possible by: Penguin Random House South Africa.

Most of us have a fair grasp of the laws governing our country – or we think we do.

We also have a fair inkling of what our rights are – but do we really know when we’ve been wronged?

In everything we do – and much of what we say – we stumble daily through the maze that is South African law and only when, often inadvertently, we go astray or we think someone else has wandered off the path, do we turn to an attorney (at not insignificant cost) to find out what we should do about it.

In this book, which should be on a bookshelf in every home in the country, Anderson et al offer a trail of breadcrumbs through the labyrinth.

The authors are the first to tell you that sometimes you cannot go it alone, that you need to consult a lawyer and that the cost of employing one is a pittance when compared to the expenses you could face if you don’t.

The value of their book is that it is a starting point for the uninitiated that outlines our rights, our responsibilities to the law and to each other and what to do when we have harmed someone, have been harmed by them or are not sure where we stand.

Starting with a comprehensive discussion of what attorneys, notaries, conveyancers and advocates are, what they do and where they may or may not do it, the authors proceed to an easily-understood description of law enforcement, the courts and their competencies, court procedure and nomenclature and what happens when the law is broken.

They also, as with all topics covered in the book, tell you what to do and who to contact if you think you have been mistreated or have a complaint about the system of someone in it.

Topics covered in the book range from human rights, taxes, family law, labour law, property transactions and finances to motor vehicles, consumer law and contracts, consumer rights, sport and recreation and credit agreements.

There is also an all-embracing list of where to complain and how to do it.

Littered throughout are “Did you knows” – pithy summaries of the paragraphs you are reading.

The authors might be academics but they manage to demystify a compendium of day-to-day laws that affect us and propose some useful solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems, all in language we can easily understand.