"What remains? The language [culture] remains"

As scholars who have struggled with the question of the relationship between transformation and law for most of our work-lives, we remain interested in and often perplexed by the ways in which legal scholars, the media and members of the public at large continue to talk about and comment on matters concerning law, constitution and change as if they are isolated or demarcated from each other. In this vein we were intrigued by the specific way in which the title of and the call for papers of a recent conference, held at the University of the Free State, was formulated: ‘Transformative constitutionalism and private law’. In our paper delivered at this conference, we spoke about what this specific formulation elicited in our minds. This article is a reworked and expanded version of that paper.