Jens Meierhenrich has written a thoughtful account of the role, status, and effects of law, an account that spans the legal history of South Africa, including the colonial period, the construction of the apartheid state, the period of political and legal transition, and the creation of the constitutional democracy post-1994. The impetus for Meierhenrich's enquiry was his perception of the gap in research that investigates ‘the general and specific effects of authoritarian legacies’ (p.1) on the project of democratization.

Meierhenrich sets out to contribute ‘new patterns, significant connections and improved interpretations’ (p. 10) to the theory of democracy and the rise of legal liberalism. In this endeavor, he enlists an interdisciplinary methodology, utilizing perspectives from economics, political science, philosophy, history, sociology, and, of course, law. He aims to demonstrate the linkages of law and politics in authoritarian as well as democratic regimes, and to examine how the role and structure of legal rules, norms, and institutions of authoritarian legal systems may have the unintended consequence of benefiting the transition to democracy – and the subsequent democratic system.

In the introduction, Meiehenrich raises two questions, namely: ‘How do legal norms and institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices; and how, once established, do they influence the responses of individuals to larger processes, especially democratization?’ (p. 2). In pursuing these enquiries in the South African context, he forms a central argument that is counter-intuitive and somewhat provocative. While not justifying or exonerating the human rights violations and excesses of apartheid, the author argues that apartheid law was ‘necessary for making democracy work’ (p. 3). In pursuance of his argument, he revives Ernst Fraenkel's theory of the dual state.

In the application of this theory as it operated in apartheid South Africa, the ‘white democratic’ legal system exists as the normative state, and the prerogative state refers to that body of law regulating the lives of the majority black population. Meierhenrich points out that the normative state, although furthering the benefits of the white minority, sometimes inadvertently resulted in beneficial effects and provided some room for legal engagement for those governed by the prerogative state. He believes that Fraenkel's concept of the dual state has contemporary relevance ‘for the comparative historical analyses of democracy’ (p. 4). In his book, South Africa and Chile provide such an example.

The Legacies of Law is divided into three parts. Part 1, entitled ‘A theory of law’, lays the theoretical groundwork for the book and establishes Meierhenrich's theoretical argument. He introduces a normative typology of law, as well as one situated in the transitional and post-conflict democratic (re)construction. This typology is intended to provide a conceptual framework for his argument about the ‘legal origins of democracy’ (p. 13). In the analytical framework explored in this section, Meierhenrich engages with the literature on path dependence and insights from other disciplinary fields, most notably economics and the social sciences.

Part II, ‘A history of law’, is the most substantial. In the chapters in this section Meierhenrich examines the legal origins of apartheid, the structure and operation of apartheid law, apartheid's endgame, and the legal transformation to democracy. His exploration of Fraenkel's dual-state theory and its application in South Africa is particularly compelling, although permutations of this thesis are to be found elsewhere, for instance in the studies of Martin Chanock, Kenneth S. Broun, and David Dyzenhaus. These accounts have explored apartheid as both a rational and an irrational system, and Meierhenrich incorporates some of these arguments and elaborates them further.

In Part III, ‘A comparative analysis’, the author pursues a comparative approach to further his argument about the plausibility of path dependence and the law. He examines the case of Chile and the role of law from the period 1830–1990, an examination that points to an almost uninterrupted period of constitutional rule, but that also includes the role of the military junta after the 1973 coup and Pinochet's subsequent endgame. In this comparison, Meierhenrich questions the assumption of South Africa as an ‘unusual’ case, because of its commitment to the principle of legality during apartheid and after the apartheid legal system had been abolished, a commitment that provided a foundation for the legal system that emerged in the wake of the democratic transformation there (p. 295). In comparing Chile, albeit in Meierhenrich's words, in a ‘tentative’ manner, he is nonetheless of the opinion that the Chilean situation supports his overall thesis of path dependence and the law.

This book is well written and Meierhenrich makes his arguments seamlessly. His bibliography is impressive, and his access to key legal and political figures in the South African political and legal transition is apparent. He has a good grasp of law's role both to thwart and to generate justice, and his application of Fraenkel's theory is persuasive. The first two sections of the book are the most convincing, but the third section is not as effective. It may be that the application of the dual-state theory is premised on the condition of a commitment to legal formalism (albeit rule by law, not necessarily rule of law), as was the hallmark of the apartheid state. In Chile, it is arguable that, although the period of constitutional democracy was substantial (in fact, over a century), Pinochet's coup resulted in the situation in which political elites maintained a system of rule by force, with only limited nods to rule by law.

Although Meierhenrich's explores the colonial record and the encounter of colonial law with indigenous law, he does not pursue this issue in the post-apartheid context, which might have completed the circle. But this is just a minor quibble with a book that will be of great interest to scholars, advocates, and policy-makers in a range of disciplines, including law, politics, history, philosophy, and economic history.