Quantification of damages for loss of amenities of life is a difficult task because there is no connection between enjoyment of life and money. The court however has to compensate the plaintiff with money because that is the only way of restitution. In compensating the plaintiff the court will award a conservative amount which is fair to both parties. The court will take into account previous awards in comparable cases but the personal circumstances of the plaintiff will form the background of the assessment. The intensity and duration of the loss of amenities of life, the plaintiff's contributory negligence, his obligation to mitigate his loss, his ability to cope with his loss and patrimonial damages tending to minimize the loss of amenities of life are all factors to be taken into account in the quantification process. / Die kwantifisering van die vergoeding vir die verlies aan lewensgenietinge is 'n moeilike taak aangesien daar geen verband tussen lewensgeluk and geld is nie. Die hof moet egter die eiser vergoed met 'n som geld aangesien dit die enigste manier van restitusie is. By kwantifisering word die doel van die vergoedingsbedrag asook billikheid en regverdigheid in gedagte gehou. Die hof sal eerder konserwatief as wispelturig te werk gaan by kwantifisering. Verder sal daar na vorige toekennings in vergelykbare gevalle gekyk word, maar uiteindelik sal die omvang van die vergoedingsbedrag bepaal word deur die persoonlike omstandighede van die eiser wat die agtergrond van die kwantifiseringsproses sal vorm. Die tydsduur en intensiteit van die verlies aan lewensgenietinge, die eiser se bydraende nalatigheid, sy verpligting om skade te beperk, sy vermoe om sy verlies te verwerk asook toekennings van 'n vermoensregtelike aard is relevant by kwantifisering. / Mercantile Law / LL.M.

Major changes have occurred in the workplace in the past decades. Technology has changed dramatically, innovative ways of utilising nuclear power have been developed, new chemicals have been introduced to the market and the adverse effects of other chemicals on both human health and safety and the environment have been discovered. This has influenced the nature of the workforce itself. Regulators in the different jurisdictions were required to react to the challenges that these changes represent. This thesis explores the responses in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the Republic of South Africa by identifying the occupational safety and health (OSH) regulations, administration, enforcement and penalties which have been put in place to address the above mentioned challenges. It is impossible to mention all the changes in the workforce and workplace that have occurred in the recent years, and this thesis therefore focuses on the possibilities that different types of regulation offer to address some of these changes. Alterations to existing approaches are proposed to ensure that enforcement is improved and better targeted. The utilisation of third parties as surrogate regulators is also addressed. The central theme of this thesis is how the law can stimulate self-regulation by adopting a Safety Management System (SMS) within enterprises to encourage “self-critical reflection about their OHS performance”. The purpose of criminal sanctions in occupational safety and health regulation, the role of the prosecution in the enforcement of OSH strategies and the possibility of combining prosecutions of corporations with prosecutions of individual managers and directors who are responsible for non-compliance with OSH standards are also addressed. Although it is most important to ensure that workers are not injured or do not contract occupational diseases, in practice this does unfortunately happen. Therefore this thesis also discusses the compensation of injured workers. / Professor D. S. de Villiers

This study aims to ascertain the legal redress available to employees who suffer psychological harm as a result of workplace stress. On a general level, it identifies and assesses some of the available policy options, particularly as they relate to the interaction of statutory workers’ compensation schemes and the common law. On a more specific level, it examines and analyses various issues: the nature and extent of compensable psychiatric harm; the legal duty on employers to protect employees’ health and well being; the role of negligence; requirements specific to the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act 130 of 1993 (COIDA); and the causal nexus necessary to sustain a claim. The conclusion is reached that employees should utilise the workers’ compensation system as the primary vehicle to obtain redress if they suffer from occupational psychiatric harm. However, due to the law’s generally conservative approach to psychiatric harm and intimations that the Department of Labour intends setting strict requirements for claims for psychiatric harm in terms of COIDA, the common law of delict might continue to play an important role in claims for occupational psychiatric harm. The writer recommends that a hybrid system for compensation for stress-related psychiatric harm suffered in the course and scope of employment be adopted, with the statutory compensation scheme providing relatively limited benefits and the common law providing general damages if the claimant can prove negligence on the part of the employer; that the requirement of a recognised psychiatric illness be maintained for both statutory compensation and compensation in terms of the common law; that all parties’ interests are carefully balanced in delineating the employer’s legal duty to employers and that undue weight not be accorded to the terms of the contract of employment; that more attention be paid to factual causation and the development of lternatives/complements to the traditional conditio sine qua non test; that the validity of the circular instruction on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) be tested on administrative-law grounds; and that the stringent prescription requirements set by the circular instruction on PTSD be reviewed.

Scholarly and public analyses of state-community conflict in resource-rich communities, especially in Nigeria, often portray the compensational practices of the state and extractive enterprises as unjust and unsustainable. According to this view, at least three issues foreground the “unjustness”, namely: a) Inadequate compensation of land owners when land is expropriated or degraded in the process of natural resource exploration and production; b) inadequate periodic rents paid by extractive firms to land owners; and c) lack of, or inadequate socio-economic infrastructure in the host communities of extractive operations. Most analysts have therefore argued for a revamp of the compensation system and have presented the inadequacy of compensation as the underlying cause of conflict in Nigeria‟s mining communities (see Frynas, 2000b:208; Okoji, 2002:205). This thesis subjects the compensation discourse to a closer examination, especially against the backdrop of underdevelopment, pervasive poverty, environmental damage and continuing corporate-community conflict in Nigeria‟s resource-rich rural communities. The main argument is that, because of some of its underlying neoliberal assumptions, much of the compensation discourse is flawed – which is why the discourse obscures the true character of state-community and corporate-community conflict. This more so, because the discourse relies mainly on post-colonial (that is, post-1960) experiences and contemporary advocacy literature, ignores the interplay between history and contemporary developments in state-community relations, and treats compensation as an independent variable. Drawing on the concept of collective memory, and utilising historical, ethnographic and survey data from two of Nigeria‟s oldest petroleum and coal-mining communities, the thesis examines how the evolution of the Nigerian state and collective memory about aspects of that evolution have shaped state-community relations in the extractive sector. It situates state- iii community resource-related conflict within the wider socio-historical matrix of state and community contestations for ecological and natural resource sovereignty. The key finding of the thesis is that within the context of socio-ecological rights, compensation demands by local communities are textured. In the case of the communities selected for the study, such demands are often made outside, rather than within, local ethnographic ideas of “justness” and “fairness”. Hence, land-related grievances associated with natural resource extraction persist, regardless of whether or not local demands for compensation are “adequately” met by the state and extractive corporations. The thesis enriches and extends our understanding of natural resource conflict by privileging both the sociological and historical contexts of the conflict and raising questions about the dominance the state enjoys over local communities and indigenous ecological spaces.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

This thesis considers two allegations which conservatives often level at no-fault systems — namely, that responsibility is abnegated under no-fault systems, and that no-fault systems under- and over-compensate. I argue that although each of these allegations can be satisfactorily met – the responsibility allegation rests on the mistaken assumption that to properly take responsibility for our actions we must accept liability for those losses for which we are causally responsible; and the compensation allegation rests on the mistaken assumption that tort law’s compensatory decisions provide a legitimate norm against which no-fault’s decisions can be compared and criticized – doing so leads in a direction which is at odds with accident law reform advocates’ typical recommendations. On my account, accident law should not just be reformed in line with no-fault’s principles, but rather it should be completely abandoned since the principles that protect nofault systems from the conservatives’ two allegations are incompatible with retaining the category of accident law, they entail that no-fault systems are a form of social welfare and not accident law systems, and that under these systems serious deprivation – and to a lesser extent causal responsibility – should be conditions of eligibility to claim benefits. / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2007.

This thesis considers two allegations which conservatives often level at no-fault systems — namely, that responsibility is abnegated under no-fault systems, and that no-fault systems under- and over-compensate. I argue that although each of these allegations can be satisfactorily met – the responsibility allegation rests on the mistaken assumption that to properly take responsibility for our actions we must accept liability for those losses for which we are causally responsible; and the compensation allegation rests on the mistaken assumption that tort law’s compensatory decisions provide a legitimate norm against which no-fault’s decisions can be compared and criticized – doing so leads in a direction which is at odds with accident law reform advocates’ typical recommendations. On my account, accident law should not just be reformed in line with no-fault’s principles, but rather it should be completely abandoned since the principles that protect nofault systems from the conservatives’ two allegations are incompatible with retaining the category of accident law, they entail that no-fault systems are a form of social welfare and not accident law systems, and that under these systems serious deprivation – and to a lesser extent causal responsibility – should be conditions of eligibility to claim benefits. / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2007.

Thesis (L.L.M. (Law)) - Rhodes University, 2008

Thesis (Ph. D. (Law))--Rhodes University, 2005.

This dissertation investigates the multiple grammars of trauma, survival, and witnessing through which personal suffering was articulated and acted upon in the aftermath of November 13, when a series of attacks on the Bataclan theater, cafés in Paris, and the Stade de France in Saint-Denis left 131 dead and thousands of survivors. Based on four years of participant observation research and original archival scholarship in France between 2018 and 2022, this research brings ethnology and history together to examine the aftereffects of colonialism not only “far afield” but also—within an epistemological frame that foregrounds relationality—at the diasporic “center.” “Postmetropolitan Trauma,” as I term it, thus offers a novel approach to the history of our present. Following the 2015 attacks in France, state insurers are processing individuals claims for PTSD compensation from the Guarantee Fund for Victims of Acts of Terrorism (FGTI). Meanwhile, an adjacent diagnostic practice is taking place at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, where neuropsychologists are conducting biomedical research on PTSD in survivors. As testimonies are being processed by FGTI for financial compensation, on the one hand, and for a science of memory, on the other, a paradox arises: The ideal survivor for the neuropsychologist is she who overcomes her PTSD, and yet, for the purposes of trauma compensation, that is, from a forensic point of view, the survivor must remain symptomatic. In analyzing this paradox, I uncover reparation as a dynamic process of community making which is wider than its result, the final awarding or denial of compensation. While studies of the “War on Terror” have focused on the rise of the terrorist as the new Other, “Postmetropolitan Trauma” instead centers on the processes of subjectivation, identity construction, and community making that compensation produce in the wake of November-13. Who is considered a “survivor,” and as such an insider to trauma, and who is denied compensation as a “mere” witness? This novel approach reveals that the themes of violence and belonging are not restricted to the construction of perpetrators alone, but also shape the treatment of victims. In so doing, the dissertation proposes a new model for understanding the contradictory impulses of inclusion and exclusion, of violence and care, that shape the making of moral communities through historical trauma.