Isaac Christopher Lubogo*
This paper presents the Lubogo Framework for Ubuntu Constitutionalism — a comprehensive, operationalised, and multi-jurisdictionally applicable framework for Ubuntu constitutionalism in African legal scholarship. Developed between 2024 and 2026 through doctoral research at Makerere University School of Law and related scholarly projects, the Framework comprises twenty original theories, tests, principles, and doctrines organised into five jurisprudential clusters. It translates Ubuntu from an ethical and cultural tradition into an operational jurisprudential architecture capable of informing constitutional reasoning, criminal accountability, bail and detention, decolonisation, semiotics, and diagnostic evaluation of judicial reasoning. The study uses doctrinal and conceptual legal analysis to consolidate the Framework, define the relationship among its twenty components, and identify its constitutional safeguards and limits. The results show a cumulative architecture moving from diagnosis of relational deficits through irreversibility-conscious reasoning and humanitarian approaches to detention, toward semiotic and decolonial constitutional analysis and diagnostic evaluation. The Framework is presented as a scholarly proposal for constitutional reasoning, not as a replacement for constitutional supremacy, legality, individual rights, precedent, or institutional competence. Its intended implication is to make Ubuntu capable of doing identifiable analytical work in Ugandan and wider African constitutional scholarship.
Ubuntu, Constitutionalism, African Jurisprudence, Relational Justice, Decolonization, Constitutional Theory
Isaac Christopher Lubogo, Suigeneris Consultancy, Kampala, Uganda; Doctor of Law Fellow (Ongoing), Makerere University School of Law, Uganda.
Lubogo, I. C. (2026). The Lubogo Framework for Ubuntu Constitutionalism: A Master Record of Twenty Original Theories, Tests, Principles, And Doctrines in African Jurisprudence. Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2(1), 01-07.