Talk:Magistrate's court (South Africa)

South Africa Mid‑importance

	South Africa portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject South Africa, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of South Africa on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.South AfricaWikipedia:WikiProject South AfricaTemplate:WikiProject South AfricaSouth Africa articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved. Common use is established by the proposer, and there is no objection. Andrewa (talk) 12:28, 7 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Magistrates' Court (South Africa) → Magistrate's Court (South Africa) – In South African usage, the singular form is "magistrate's court" not "magistrates' court".

The official singular form is "magistrate's court": see the definition of "court" on page 5 of the Magistrates' Courts Act.
The media uses the form "Magistrate's Court": see, just from the last few days of news, from Independent Newspapers: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]; and from The Times: [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14].

I'm also open to the possibility that "Magistrate's court (South Africa)" or "Magistrates' Courts of South Africa" would be better titles. htonl (talk) 21:49, 30 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Reorganization

The magistrate's courts in South Africa are being reorganised, a process going on since about 2010 or 2014 and also known as 're-establishment'. The most prominent aspect of this reorganisation is that the legal districts will equivalent with the municipalities, which means that many previous magisterial districts will live on either as sub-districts or only as historical areas. This is called 'rationalisation' (supposedly the new division are better accommodated to population distribution in present times) but the process is also aimed at 'enhancing access to justice'.

It seems that the present article needs to be updated. The list of former districts could be kept as historical information, but a general description of the reorganisation process is heavily needed and when the district boundaries differ from those of the administrative districts (the government suggests that this may happen in a few cases when strict adherence to municipal boundaries would impede access justice) it could be mentioned somewhere.

Some sources:

There are also plans for re-establishment of separate, specialist courts, notably the Sexual Offences Courts, see [15], [16] and [17]. Bever (talk) 19:25, 27 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Magistrate's court (South Africa). Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090803105409/http://www.info.gov.za/aboutgovt/justice/courts.htm to http://www.info.gov.za/aboutgovt/justice/courts.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 05:13, 30 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Traditional Courts

The article states that Magistrates' Courts "... are the courts of first instance for most criminal cases except for the most serious crimes". Question: What about traditional courts? As I understand it, they still handle a considerable number of minor criminal cases (see e.g. T. W. Bennett, Customary Criminal Law in the South African Legal System. in: Future of African Customary Law, Cambridge University Press 2011). 178.5.158.65 (talk) 16:40, 25 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]