The Hermeneutic of Restoration: The Judiciary's Positive Duty as an Instrument of Restorative Justice in the Post-Authoritarian Constitutional State
“The Constitution mandates a transition from a culture of authority to a culture of justification. Where legal formalism perpetuates historical inequities by rendering certain lives and contributions invisible, the Court must engage in a substantive, normative analysis that pierces the veil of transactional facades. It is compelled to develop the common law not as an act of judicial overreach, but as a positive duty to dismantle architectures of exploitation embedded in the non-recognition of intimate, religiously-sanctioned partnerships. This is the hermeneutic of restoration: a juridical process that diagnoses systemic discrimination not as a passive omission, but as an active violation of dignity, and prescribes a remedy that quantifies the denied equity in contemporary terms, thereby transforming the law from a tool of exclusion into an instrument of restorative justice.”
-Whalid Safodien
The Feather Pen
