Abstract
How should the law respond to a period of grave injustice in which certain categories of people were systematically deprived of their property rights and what is the impact of the passage of time on restitution issues in dynamic societies'? The argument will be made, first, that, irrespective of the passage of time, the implementation of a certain policy of restitution of property rights is a necessary step in the (re-) establishment of a democratic legal order. However, law's function in dealing with past deprivations of property rights will vary with the passage of time. If the lapse of time between the moment of past injustice and the moment of restitution has been relatively short, it is possible to conceive of the restitution process as a problem of corrective justice: as conflicts between original owners of property rights and current owners in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ faith. After a substantial lapse of time, the financial burden of the restitution process will shift to the collective as a whole and the restitution process will become entangled in redistributive and future-oriented policies. The complexity of law's function in dealing with injustices in the far past will be illustrated with a brief look at the contemporary land restitution process in post-Apartheid South Africa.