Preliminary notes - preface
| Date | 24 December 2019 |
| Published date | 24 December 2019 |
vii
Preface
When an academic of Danie Visser’s stature retires, it is traditional
to arrange a Festschrift to honour their body of work. But in
Danie’s case, it seemed to us and our colleagues in the University of
Cape Town’s Department of Private Law that what really required
celebrating was his return to the world of full-time research after
almost a decade as Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University. In that
spirit, on Danie’s retirement in late 2016 we made a bid for the 2019
volume of Acta Juridica. But we were faced with a diculty: given
the broad range of Danie’s research interests and his extraordinary
international network of friends and research collaborators, how
could we nd a unifying theme for the volume?
Danie’s principal contribution to scholarship has been the leading
role he has played in establishing the comparative law of unjust or
unjustied enrichment as an international eld of study. His 2008
book, Unjustied Enrichment, has quickly become a standard work
of reference on the subject, not only in South Africa but across the
English-speaking world. However, Danie’s research interests extend
far beyond the law of enrichment. He has contributed highly
inuential chapters on delict to several editions of Wille’s Principles
of South African Law and has published a series of important articles
and edited collections on delict in South Africa and Scotland. He
has written on the South African law of contract and property, on
legal education, and on the comparative method. Moreover, his
scholarship is invariably informed by the rigorous training in legal
history which he received during his time in Leiden completing his
(second) doctorate under the supervision of Robert Feenstra. His
edited collection Essays on the History of Law, published in 1989,
includes the seminal piece, ‘The Legal Historian as Subversive; or:
Killing the Capitoline Geese’. And his (rst) doctorate, published
in 1981, concerned the incorporation of indigenous customary law
into South African private law.
As for Danie’s research network, it was when he took up his
position as Professor of Private Law at the University of Cape Town
in 1984 that he met Reinhard Zimmermann, then WP Schreiner
Professor of Roman and Comparative Law. This was the beginning
of a friendship and professional collaboration which has spanned
more than three decades and which extends also to many of
Reinhard’s former students. Danie’s writing has been particularly
2019 ACTA Preface
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