About us

As a broad category, mercantile law deals with 

• Business entitities
• The legal relationships created by commercial transactions
• Labour law
• Insolvency law
• Intellectual property law and competition law
• Social security law
• Taxation 
• Banking law

The present chair of Department is Professor Muthu Sigwadi.

The Department also houses the Centre for Business Law. The present Head of the Centre for Business Law is Professor Coenraad Visser.

Many members of the Department serve on influential bodies in business and government, and are recognized in South Africa and internationally as leaders in their fields. For example:

• Professor Michele Havenga is a member of the Standing Advisory Committee on Company Law
• Professor Peter Havenga is a member of the Presidential Council of the Association Internationale de Droit des Assurances
• Professor Roshana Kelbrick is
  • a member of the International Advisory Board of the International Encyclopaedia of Laws
  • a member of the Patents Examination Board
• Professor Tana Pistorius is
  • a faculty member of the International Cyberlaw Clinic
  • a research fellow of the  Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
  • a senior adjudicator of the SAIIPL alternate dispute resolution panel for the .za domain-name system
• Professor Coenraad Visser is
  • a correspondent of Computer Law Review International
  • a Visiting Professorial Fellow of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute at the University of London
  • the executive editor for common-law African countries of the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law, published by the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law

In 1998, on the basis of a survey among some 300 human resources specialists in private and listed companies and parastatals, the Professional Management Review awarded Unisa two awards:

• Golden Award as the best university for Labour Law, Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Silver Award as the best university for Commercial Law 

The Department was one of the founding participants of the Legal Network e-commerce, initiated by the Centre for e-Law of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

In addition to the many publications authored by its members, the Department is the editorial home of the only four specialist journals on commercial law published in South Africa: 

• South African Mercantile Law Journal 
• Juta’s Business Law
• Juta's Insurance Law Bulletin 
• Annual Survey of South African Law 

The Department presents courses for undergraduate and postgraduate law students, as well as for non-law students.