Citizens of South Africa are confronting a painful past through the new nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, which thus far has heard thousands of reports (many televised) about murders, torture, and other human rights abuses that took place during the apartheid era. South Africa's TRC is grounded in a constitutional commitment to the African concept of “ubuntu,” or humaneness. Amnesty is available on a conditional basis to alleged perpetrators. The author assesses the potential restorative power of truth‐telling; the significance of sympathetic witnesses; and the tasks of both perpetrators and bystanders in the TRC process. Aspirations for justice are considered along with restoring dignity to victims, offering a basis for individual healing, and promoting reconciliation of a divided society.

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I can't reconcile the sight of a battered child with the belief that we choose what happens to us, that we create our own world.-Gloria Anzaldfza 1 Rights are under attack. Some conservatives criticize the expansion of rights for lacking a legitimate basis, for contributing to adversariness and social conflict, or for undermining respect for law. Some left-leaning scholars criticize rights because they are incoherent and indeterminate, or because they fail to promote community and responsibility. Whatever the reason, rights criticism abounds. A rather obvious historical observation might explain the current popularity of rights criticism. Legal and political reforms in the last few decades have successfully established new rights based upon race, gender, environment, age, and handicap, and many legal scholars disapprove of these directions of change. On the other hand, the actual articulation and enforcement of these rights in specific contexts has disappointed those who seek more significant changes. Perhaps, more subtly, the visions of human relationships implied by newly recognized rights disturb and disappoint both those who have faith in traditional cultural forms and those who have hopes for as yet unrealized alternatives. Once rights are perceived as vulnerable to attack, they are widely perceived as inadequate. One contemporary development in legal scholarship that offers a response to each of these critiques of rights describes law's method as "interpretation." As a theory of judicial action, this interpretive turn no doubt owes a debt to similar developments in theories of social science, literary t Professor of Law, Harvard University. I am deeply grateful for the help given by Joe Singer,

aws permitting, and even requiring, [racial] separation in places where [the races] are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. II So long as the accommodations provided were equal, continued the Court, 5. 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 6. The dilemma also occupies feminist discussions. See Eisenstein, Introduction to THE FUTURE OF DIFFERENCE at xv, xvii-xviii (H. Eisenstein & A. Jardin eds. 1980); Jardin, Prelude: The Future of Difference, in THE FUTURE OF DIFFERENCE, supra, at xxv, xxvi. See generally THE FUTURE OF DIFFERENCE, supra. 7. See R. KLUGER, SIMPLE JUSTICE 777-78 (1976). 8. See generally M. FANTINI, M. GITrELL & R. MAGAT, COMMUNITY CONTROL AND THE URBAN SCHOOL (1970) (failures of integration and compensatory education led to demands for community control by less powerful parent groups); D. RAVITCH, THE GREAT SCHOOL WARS (1974); Comment, Alternative Schools for Minority Students: The Constitution, the Civil Rights Act and the Berkeley Experiment, 61 CALIF. L. REV. 858, 899 (1973) (arguing in favor of racially homogeneous community schools). 9. 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 10. See id. at 544 (citing Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. (5 Cush.) 198, 206 (1849)). The Massachusetts precedent had itself been superseded by state legislation requiring integrated schools just six years after the Roberts decision-long before Plessy. 11. Id. 23. See M. CURTI, THE SOCIAL IDEAS OF AMERICAN EDUCATORS 288-309 (1959) (comparing Washington and Dubois); R. KLUGER, supra note 7, at 91-100 (same); see also W.E.B. DUBOlS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1916) (describing richness of black heritage deserving preservation); B. WASHINGTON, Up FROM SLAVERY (1970) (describing his own education and conception of education for blacks).