The 1995 South African Constitutional Court case S v Makwanyane, which abolished the death penalty as incompatible with the interim Constitution, gave ubuntu its most influential legal application, and several judges wrote separately to explain what role the concept played in their reasoning.
Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, whose concurring judgment engaged with ubuntu most directly, described it as encompassing group solidarity, compassion, respect, dignity and a preference for conciliation over conflict, and argued that these values, invoked in the Constitution's own epilogue, supported treating even a convicted murderer as retaining fundamental dignity that state-sanctioned killing would violate, since ubuntu's emphasis on the humanity that binds people together cuts against a punishment premised on treating the offender as having forfeited membership in the moral community. Justice Ismail Mahomed likewise invoked ubuntu as part of a broader argument that the new constitutional order represented a break from a past defined by state violence, connecting capital punishment to the wider transitional project the Constitution's epilogue framed in ubuntu's own vocabulary of reconciliation.
The judgment has since become a standard reference point, cited by admirers as proof that an African philosophical concept can do genuine work in constitutional interpretation, and by critics who argue the judges' invocations of ubuntu remained brief compared to the doctrinal analysis built on more conventional constitutional grounds elsewhere in the same judgment, so ubuntu's actual causal contribution to the court's reasoning, as opposed to its rhetorical framing, remains disputed among scholars of South African constitutional law.