Arthur Chaskalson: A Life Dedicated to Justice for All

by Stephen Ellmann

Arthur A Life Dedicated to Justicefor All is a biography of a remarkable life lived in service both to law and to the struggle for social change and justice. The social change it describes is the victory over apartheid, which was won on several fronts and through the efforts of people in many nations, but an important one of those fronts lay in the courts of South Africa itself. Arthur Chaskalson’s life story and the four phases of his remarkable career – advocate at the Johannesburg Bar; founder and leader of the Legal Resources Centre; his involvement in the constitution-making process; and his term as the first Chief Justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court – embody the story of law in the struggle against apartheid and then in a newly created democracy. At the same time, Chaskalson’s chronicle is also individual, the shaping of the moral intelligence of a lawyer and a judge, trusted by everyone he dealt with, through the fires of a lifetime’s opposition to a society’s injustice. In exploring Chaskalson’s life and career, we appreciate more clearly the roles lawyers can play in social change and the achievement of a just social order, and at the same time we gain insight into the combination of upbringing, experience and character that shapes a man first into a ‘cause lawyer’ and then into a path-breaking and foundation-laying judge.

1217 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2019

Reviews

[Tafadzwa Kwaramba · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is comprehensive and gives an account of Arthur's personal life as well as his career as a lawyer coupled by the overarching question of identity in the context of Apartheid. Arthur, along with his mentor Bram, was a lawyer for the Rivonia trialists. Given that Bram Fischer was a regular at RIvonia and somehow slipped the dragnet and ended up representing the accused brings into sharp focus the difference between Arthur and Bram Fischer. Arthur had only briefly been a member of a liberal political party before deciding to use law as an instrument to fight apartheid. This contrast between the stories of Arthur and Bram and their relative contribution to apartheid brings the question of whether active politics is the only way to resist injustice and oppression in society. Arthur went on to be part of the ANC teams that drafted the interim SA constitution in 1994 as well as the Namibian constitution before that as well as representing many ANC activists, MK cadres and student activists in the 1980s. This shows how Arthur effectively used the law to resist and to an extent demonstrates that perhaps political radicalism isn't the only way and that each individual, based on their proclivities and temperament, has their space in the continuum of methods of resisting oppression. The book goes into a lot of detail into the legal nuances and minefields that Arthur had to navigate in each of these cases.

The second section of the book deals with how Arthur led the SA constitutional court as the first chief justice in the context of integrating new judges and keeping those who had enforced apartheid so that the justice system wouldn't collapse from having not enough competent judges. A huge part of this second section is dedicated to jurisprudence with key focus on human rights, transformation,regulating power and establishing the authority of the court. I found the section a bit dense to read as I have a quantitative background. However, what was quickly evident was that the law is not necessarily as objective as laymen may make it out to be and it is to a large extent subjective. A key issue that Arthur regularly pointed out in his reasoning for decisions he reached was that the court should be careful not to give judgements that can't be carried out as this would make the court undermine its own authority and this reasoning reminded me of the recent supreme court judgement that the MDC should revert to its 2014 structures in Zimbabwe.

The book is written with rigour and if one is not a lawyer, it requires patient reading in the jurisprudence section as the writer assumes that the reader is familiar with law jargon. I found the in depth analysis of the reasoning in various cases such as the TAC, Soobramoney and thee case of Sex Workers Education and Advocacy that was decided in 2002 quite interesting. Overall a great read for the patient reader who is looking for material that requires critical engagement in the context of the real world.