At present, following the failure of the “willing buyer, willing seller” experiment, Namibia’s ambitious land reform programme is politically and legally anchored in a promise of widespread land expropriation to end the apartheid-era creation of two systems of land tenure: one, communal lands for blacks, and the other, large commercial farms almost exclusively for whites.1 This policy escaped any form of judicial review from its inception in the first decade of Namibia’s Independence, celebrated in 1990, until the handing down of the judgements in the case of Gunther Kessl and the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement, and two essentially identical companion cases, in the High Court of Namibia on 6 March 2008.2 The Court treats the three cases as analytically identical, referring to them throughout as “Kessl”, and we have followed suit in this report.