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The rapid integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into higher education is fundamentally reshaping how students access and present knowledge. Within legal education particularly, AI tools increasingly enable students to generate summaries, conduct research, draft legal content and retrieve information with minimal engagement in traditional legal reasoning processes. At the same time, South African law faculties remain tasked with cultivating industry ready candidate legal practitioners who possess critical thinking abilities, ethical judgment, persuasive communication skills as well as strong legal research competencies. This creates an important pedagogical tension. While AI may enhance efficiency and technological fluency, its uncritical use may simultaneously undermine the intellectual rigour required for competent legal practice. This paper critically examines whether the growing integration of AI in legal education supports or compromises the cultivation of graduate attributes required within the South African legal profession. Using a doctrinal and conceptual methodology, the study analyses the graduate competency frameworks advanced by the Council on Higher Education and the South African Qualifications Authority. It further interrogates whether AI tools meaningfully contribute toward the development of legal reasoning, ethical sensitivity, drafting proficiency and contextual interpretation, all of which remain central to professional legal readiness. The paper argues that although AI presents significant opportunities for enhancing legal research efficiency and technological competence, overreliance on these tools risks producing graduates who are technologically capable yet jurisprudentially underdeveloped. It contends that AI cannot replace the human processes of critical engagement, ethical reflection and contextual legal interpretation that define legal education within a constitutional democracy. The study concludes that responsible AI integration in legal education requires careful pedagogical design and ethical oversight to ensure that innovation does not come at the expense of professional competence and intellectual integrity.

The study sought to relationship between enterprise risk management practices (ERM) and perceived sustainability of emerging and junior mining sector in South Africa as it creates employments and mineral diversification. This sector remains vulnerable to various risks factors including financial and regulatory among others.  The objective of the study was to examine the relationship between enterprise risk management practices and perceived sustainability of emerging and junior mining sector in South Africa. The study was anchored upon the governance theory. The study adopted the use of a quantitative methodology with a cross-sectional design using a secondary data panel downloaded from Kaggle data repository. The sample size of the study was 500 which included 262 males and 238 females who work in different mining organisational sizes. Regression analysis and structural equation modeling were tested and run to test the hypothesised statements. The results of OLS regression model 1 show that ERM_Governance has a positive and significant effect on sustainability and ERM_Value shows a negative and significant association, and other ERM dimensions are positive but not statistically significant. OLS regression Model 2 for perceived socio-economic importance shows that ERM_learning is a positive and significant predictor of socio-economic importance, and other ERM dimensions are not significant in this model. On the SEM front, ERM practices exhibited strong positive effects on both perceived sector sustainability and socio-economic importance (p < 0.001). Perceived sector sustainability significantly mediated the relationship between ERM practices and socio-economic importance (p < 0.001). Additionally, organisations size and mining experience were found to significantly moderate the ERM-sustainability relationship (p < 0.05), indicating the presence of contextual effects within the emerging and junior mining sector. The theoretical implication suggests that ERM should be taken as a monolithic construct but rather as a set of complementary dimensions with distinct outcome pathways. Practically, the results imply that policymakers and mining executives should prioritise strong governance and accountability systems to enhance sustainability perceptions while simultaneously investing in learning and collaborative capabilities to maximise socio-economic impact.

Cross-sector fraud between South Africa’s financial and telecommunications sectors has intensified, driven by sophisticated criminal networks that exploit operational disparities between these industries. Traditional fraud detection systems, which depend on centralised data sharing and siloed organisational structures, encounter substantial legal and practical obstacles under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). These include restrictions on cross-entity data transfer, data minimisation requirements, and transparency obligations for automated decision-making. This study developed and evaluated a privacy-preserving framework that integrates Federated Learning (FL) and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to enable collaborative fraud detection while safeguarding customer privacy and ensuring regulatory compliance. A mixed-method approach was employed. Quantitative experiments were conducted on a dataset of 35,675 credit card transactions linked to telecommunications parameters, training a federated global model across simulated financial and telecommunications providers. A qualitative systematic literature review identified key barriers to cross-sector collaboration and distilled lessons from prior Federated Learning and Explainable Artificial Intelligence implementations. The federated model demonstrated strong detection performance, achieving a ROC-AUC of 0.98, near-perfect precision and recall for legitimate transactions, and an F1-score of 0.89 for the minority fraud class, all without exchanging raw customer data between institutions. SHAP analysis identified TransactionAmt and card1 as the most influential features, thereby satisfying POPIA's transparency mandates. While federated approaches did not consistently surpass siloed models in raw accuracy, this marginal trade-off reflects the essential privacy-utility equilibrium required for legal compliance. The framework effectively reconciled collective security with individual privacy, confirming that POPIA adherence need not diminish detection efficacy. This study provides a validated blueprint for financial and telecommunications providers in South Africa to collaboratively counter cross-sector fraud within regulatory constraints. The framework further supports audit trail generation and decision rationales, addressing compliance obligations. Drawing on systematic literature review insights, particularly regarding collaboration barriers and prior Federated Learning and Explainable Artificial Intelligence implementations, the findings offer regulators and investors practical guidance for meeting statutory requirements without compromising privacy rights.

The study examined the critical approach adopted by entrepreneurship and policy development in promoting socio-economic development. In this review. It also looked at the difficulties small, micro, and medium-sized businesses in South Africa face. The conceptual research looked at the influence of small, micro, and medium-sized companies (SMMEs) on South African development. The study's objective was to evaluate how small, medium-sized businesses (SMMEs) are now driving economic growth and solving social issues in a setting where big businesses and governments appear to be doing very little. As a result, the study examines how SMMEs might help the nation solve persistent societal evils, including poverty, inequality, and social isolation. A desktop literature review research design was adopted to collect data on the role of entrepreneurship in South Africa. The study further looks at policies and practices of big business and government that exacerbate social issues in communities and impede socio-economic development, as well as the specific roles that SMMEs play in achieving socio-economic development goals. The findings reveal that, among various developmental outcomes, SMMEs are at the forefront of generating employment and promoting social and political justice within the nation. Future empirical studies should account for and evaluate the importance of SMME contributions to constructing economic, social, and political justice in the nation.

This study explored the relationship between consumerism, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and ethical performance in Zimbabwe through a survey analysis. The research explored the differences in consumerism between developed and less developed countries and identified various influence consumerism, including economic situation, level of consumer education and awareness, and cultural considerations. The concept of consumerism was familiar to Zimbabwean consumers, but they lacked a comprehensive understanding of how it could be used to hold businesses accountable. Consumerism is in its infancy in Zimbabwe, and citizens lack awareness of their rights and obligations. This research relied on the understanding and perceptions of consumers to examine the relationship between consumerism, CSR, and ethical performance in Zimbabwe, as well as the effects of consumer activism on corporate behaviour. The data for this exploratory study was collected and analysed using qualitative methodologies from a representative sample of 200 Zimbabwean consumers chosen at random. The collected questionnaires were carefully analysed and structured to identify themes and key differences, providing a holistic understanding of the study. The findings indicated that consumers in Zimbabwe prioritise price, brand, quality, and country of origin over CSR and the ethical performance of organisations. This suggests that businesses in Zimbabwe have little incentive to prioritise CSR and ethical behaviour unless it aligns with the demands of consumers. The research highlighted the need for more education and awareness-raising efforts around CSR and ethical business practices in Zimbabwe. Overall, the study underscored the importance of consumerism and its impact on corporate social responsibility and ethical performance in Zimbabwe.  

As globalization continues to reshape the business landscape, the use of Business process outsourcing services and activities is gaining significant popularity among businesses. The exact services and activities that benefits and create a sustainable competitive advantage to organizations remain underexplored and few studies have been conducted in the Southern Africa developing countries including South African mobile operators. The main purpose of this study was to redress the existing knowledge gap by ascertaining the actual services and activities that the mobile telecom operators are outsourcing for sustainable competitive advantage. A structured closed-ended questionnaire was used to collect raw data from 210 employees. Overall, the results indicate that some of the key services and activities outsourced for sustainable competitive advantage included building and managing network infrastructure, network roll-out and management, manufacturing of mobile network equipment, monitoring the mobile network on capacity overload and breakdowns and assembly operations, maintenance of the base stations of mobile network, manufacturing of hard software components and resolving software problems and fleet management. The practical implications of the findings, assist organizational management in making informed and structured decisions through the identification of critical activities and services that contribute to the attainment of a sustainable competitive advantage and performance improvement of the mobile telecom operators.

Financial markets are a system of complex price dynamics that are often influenced by various nonlinear factors. Traditional linear models often do not capture the inherent nonlinearities that exist between them. The aim of this study was to examine the interconnectedness of global financial markets using a multivariate Granger causality framework, focusing the United States, Europe, Asia, and emerging markets. Daily closing share prices spanning 13 years were utilised (January 2010 to December 2023) to analyze the shock transmission dynamics. The findings revealed unidirectional causality from the U.S. to European, Japanese, and Emerging markets, underscoring its dominant role in global financial networks. Conversely, European and Asian markets exhibit no reverse causality on the United States, highlighting asymmetrical interdependence. Notably, China’s Shanghai Composite Granger-causes Emerging market returns, reflecting its rising influence. These insights challenge conventional models that underestimate multilateral linkages, demonstrating that financial integration has intensified bidirectional interactions between Emerging markets and developed markets. By implication, investors should reassess exposure to dominant markets like the U.S. and China’s growing sway over Emerging economies while policymakers should prioritize cross-border spillover monitoring and systemic risk frameworks to address asymmetrical dependencies. Also, institutions must adopt nonlinear models to better capture shock transmission and evolving interdependencies, enhancing resilience against contagion.

The increasing inter relationship between financial markets have led to the discovery of new risk dynamics particularly when considering downside risk. Recent advances in econometric modelling have prompted the search for new insights into the intertemporal dynamics between downside risks and expected stock returns. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate this relationship in the S&P 500, the FTSE 100, the DAX, the Nikkei 225, and the TSX Composite, covering the period from January 2000 to December 2023. Using a time-varying transition probability model, the findings revealed consistent negative correlations between downside risk measures and expected returns across all markets, with CVaR exhibiting stronger inverse relationships compared to VaR. These findings challenge the classical risk-return trade-off but align with behavioural explanations where heightened risk aversion during downturns suppresses returns. The regime-switching analysis further uncovers asymmetry in transition probabilities where high-risk regimes persist with a 74% probability, while low-risk regimes show greater stability. By implication, this study provides empirical support for regulatory frameworks prioritizing tail risk mitigation, particularly in volatile markets.

The aim of this study was to investigate phase distribution and phase correlation dynamics across international financial markets to uncover cyclical patterns, synchronization, and contagion effects. The sample financial markets were the S&P 500, DAX, Nikkei 225, FTSE 100, Shanghai Composite, BSE Sensex with daily closing prices ranging from 2018–2023. Using the Hilbert-Huang Transform complemented by Phase Concentration Index, Kuiper tests, and Granger causality, the results reveal distinct phase clustering in the Shanghai and BSE Sensex. Developed markets exhibit lower volatility clustering (S&P 500: 28% high-volatility phases) but stronger cross-market synchronization (S&P-DAX: 0.82 correlation), underscoring their interconnectedness. The S&P 500 emerges as a global anchor, Granger-causing European and Asian markets with 1.8–3.5-day lags. Crisis periods, particularly COVID-19, amplify synchronization (average correlation=0.92), while non-crisis phases show market-specific volatility (correlation=0.65). Emerging markets demonstrate regional co-movement (Shanghai-BSE: 0.73), offering diversification opportunities. The findings highlight the hierarchical structure of global markets, where developed economies drive cycles, while emerging markets remain prone to instability. This study advances phase-based methodologies as tools for systemic risk monitoring, providing insights into crisis contagion and investor strategies balancing short-term synchronization with long-term diversification.