## Facts

- A landowner sued a neighboring landowner for damages after a veld fire allegedly started on the neighbor’s land and spread onto the plaintiff’s farmland.
- The land where the fire allegedly originated was outside a declared fire control area.
- A statute governing veld, forest, and mountain fires imposed a rebuttable presumption of negligence in civil actions when such a fire occurred on land outside a fire control area.
- The defendant challenged the statute’s constitutionality, arguing it treated fire defendants differently from other delict defendants and created an unconstitutional evidentiary burden.
- The trial court referred the constitutional question to the constitutional court; the merits of civil liability were not decided in the constitutional proceedings.

## Issues

1. Whether the statutory presumption of negligence in civil fire-damage actions unlawfully violated the constitutional equality guarantee by irrational differentiation or unfair discrimination.
2. Whether the presumption infringed the constitutional right of an accused person to be presumed innocent.

## Decision

- The court upheld the constitutionality of the statutory presumption of negligence.
- The differentiation created by the statute had a rational connection to legitimate governmental purposes tied to wildfire prevention, control, and compensation.
- The measure did not amount to unfair discrimination because it was not based on listed or analogous suspect grounds and applied generally to landowners whose land fell within the statute’s scope.
- The presumption-of-innocence right was confined to criminal proceedings and was not violated by a rebuttable presumption used in civil litigation.
- The matter was returned to the trial court for continuation of the civil action with the statute remaining operative.

## Legal Principles

- Equality analysis distinguishes permissible differentiation from discrimination; a threshold question is whether the differentiation is rationally connected to a legitimate governmental purpose.
- If differentiation is rational and non-arbitrary, a further question is whether it nevertheless constitutes unfair discrimination, especially where it is based on listed or comparable grounds associated with impairment of dignity or systemic disadvantage.
- Legislatures may address complex social and environmental risks incrementally; courts generally allow policy space where the measure is rational and not unfairly discriminatory.
- A rebuttable presumption shifting an evidentiary burden in civil proceedings can be constitutionally valid where connected to a legitimate regulatory objective.
- The constitutional presumption of innocence protects accused persons in criminal proceedings and does not, without more, invalidate civil evidentiary presumptions.

## Conclusion

The court sustained a statutory civil presumption of negligence for specified fires outside fire control areas, holding it rationally related to wildfire regulation and not unfairly discriminatory, and rejected an attempt to extend the criminal presumption of innocence to civil liability rules.


Prinsloo v. Van der Linde, 1997 (3) S. Afr. L.R. 1012 (S. Afr. Const. Ct. 1997)