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A Profession in Transformation
Abstract
The dynamics of the contemporary South African legal profession have many roots in the events of the last 30 years. These were momentous times – from the 1980s state of emergency through the transition from apartheid to the constitutional democracy of the 1990s and then to the decidedly more uncertain present. To a large extent, the last three decades are a story of what has not happened. The legal pro- fession has not transformed to the extent many imagined, hoped, or feared.The slow pace of demographic change has been matched by that of other transformations – educational, pro-competitive, and regulatory – all of which affect the legal profession. After sketching the current structure of the legal profession, this chapter investigates these four processes as well as other significant developments. It concludes after briefly touching on access to justice and public interest law.
... In the area of gender-based violence, many victims are unwilling to proactively seek access to justice. 15 As an African jurisdiction, the extent of the access to justice gap is also interwoven with the boundary between what the anthropologists term things African and things not so. 16 At base, the access to justice gap is fundamentally tied up with the distinction between substantive and procedural justice. ...
... IWhile in a different manner and to a different degree, the South African legal services sector has also been subject to attention from the competition authorities and is certainly now subject to greater competition than was the case thirty30 years or even at apartheid's end. 15 Taking a public interest approach to the analysis of market failure, Stephen's economic and regulatory method helps greatly to provide a foundation for this article's e discussion of the cost of justice in South Africaa below. To mention just one of his observations, Stephen points out that legal services tend to be what economists called "credence goods". ...
... In a different manner and to a different degree, the South African legal services sector has also been subject to attention from the competition authorities and is certainly now subject to greater competition than was the case thirty years or even at apartheid's end. 15 Taking a public interest approach to the analysis of market failure, Stephen's economic and regulatory method helps greatly to provide a foundation for this article's discussion of the cost of justice in South Africa. Stephen points out that legal services tend to be what economists called "credence goods". ...
Access to justice is not a reality for most South Africans. While it is not the only factor, a significant part of this situation is due to the high cost of legal services. This article outlines and justifies a research method to assess legal costs for the South African and other populations. The proposed research method divides the population into three bands based on economic resources: the poor, the wealthy, and those in between. In each of these three bands, the article preliminarily surveys the costs currently pertaining to legal services in civil justice matters in South Africa.
... The four largest firms, all resident in the Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, each employed over 350 lawyers. 24 The size and shape of South African law schools have remained relatively constant over the past three decades. In mid-2018, there were 16 public universities accredited and offering the LLB law degree, as well as law majors in other undergraduate degrees. ...
The aim of this paper is to combine work on lawyers, the legal profession and lawyering in Africa in an era of globalization with some of the theory and insights from the new literature emerging on the Africanization of international economic law and to do so by identifying and exploring as an object of study an African competition field.
This conference paper proceeds in three steps. Step One sketches current dynamics of the legal profession in Africa. Step Two identifies several locations where structures and practices of the legal profession in Africa are increasing intentional about doing African lawyering. Step Three presents some initial research on corporate law teams practicising African competition lawyering. A conclusion offers some thoughts on further steps.
... e. barristers) in 2014, for instance. 57 One important aspect of this debate about 'transformation' concerned the persistent patterns of inequality within South Africa's university law schools, which fed the legal profession with fresh graduates each year (Klaaren 2020). In some senses, there were huge structural transformations of South Africa's segregated universities. ...
The history of South Africa's urban-based ‘struggle lawyers’ – a trajectory epitomized by Nelson Mandela – is much discussed by historians and biographers, reflecting a broader vein of historiography that celebrates anti-colonial legal activism. However, it was South Africa's ‘Native Reserves’ and Bantustans that produced the majority of African lawyers for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, two-thirds of the African justices who have sat on the post-apartheid Constitutional Court either practised or trained in the Bantustans during the apartheid era. The purpose of this article is thus to reappraise South Africa's ‘legal field’ – the complex relationship between professional formation, elite reproduction and the exercise of political power – by tracing the ambiguous role played by the Native Reserves/Bantustans in shaping the African legal profession across the twentieth century. How did African lawyers, persistently marginalized by century-long patterns of exclusion, nevertheless construct an elite profession within the confines of segregation and apartheid? How might we link the histories of the Bantustans with the better-known ‘struggle historiography’ that emphasizes the role of political and legal activism in the cities? And what are the implications of South Africa's segregated history for debates about the ‘decolonization’ of the legal profession in the post-apartheid era?
Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice - edited by Vivek Maru December 2018
This article considers the historical, political and social context of the LLB degree -especially insofar as it pertains to teaching legal ethics. It reviews the role of the law, the legal profession and the system higher education not only during the apartheid era, but also during the transition to democracy and in contemporary South Africa. In addition, this article also provides a detailed explication of the efforts to transform legal education since 1994. Aspects which are especially relevant to the question of legal ethics in the LLB degree are highlighted. Finally, the current state of legal education in South Africa is discussed.
This article reflects on recent debates on legal education in South Africa. I argue that the value of legal education should not be indexed by how well it serves the needs and expectations of the legal profession and judiciary, but rather how it contributes to a new jurisprudence suited to the legal, social and political transformation of South Africa. I therefore argue against a reading of the crisis of legal education as one that is instrumental and economical (the inability to produce efficient legal professionals) and focus rather on the jurisprudential crises that lie at the heart of law and jurisprudence, namely the crisis set in motion by the shift from a general jurisprudence, centered on the ideal of justice, to a restricted jurisprudence, focused merely on the coherence of the positive law. I argue that what is needed as a response to this crisis is a critical legal education, or an approach to the study and teaching of law grounded in a critical jurisprudence. The turn to a critical legal education suggested in this article is then further linked to an understanding of law as a humanities discipline and to the humility that this will require of legal academics, lawyers and judges.
By contrast with the judges and the advocates, the issue of race and gender representivity in the attorneys segment of the legal profession generally and in large corporate law firms specifically has not received significant attention, in part due to the lack of accurate statistics and a thin research tradition. Addressing the gap, a 2013 survey investigated the demographics of legal professionals in large corporate law firms in South Africa. The chief finding of the survey is that South Africa’s major corporate law firms are still dominated by white men, especially in their upper echelons. Further, nearly half of the African women professionally employed in large corporate law firms (48.1%) are candidate attorneys, which is to say non-admitted legal professionals. These findings are consistent with the few earlier studies that have been conducted and indicate the need for further detailed research into the social dynamics of the African legal profession.
1. Glossary of Acronyms and Foreign Words 2. Speaking with the Ogre 3. Politics by Other Means? 4. Carving Loopholes in the Pass Laws 5. White Resistance to the Military 6. Seeking Recognition 7. Mpophomeni and the War in Ntal 8. State Terrorism:The Response of Law and Medicine to Police Torture 9. Censorship and the Closure of the New Nation 10. The Alexandra Treason Trial 11. Bakwena ba Magopa:The Last Forced Removal 12. Moutse and KwaNdebele:Ethnicity and Gender in the Challange to Grand Apartheid 13. Disestablishing Oukasie 14. The Roles of Law
Scholars have devoted considerable attention and resources to creating and expanding legal aid clinics, law school clinics, and university-based law clinics in order to make the law school experience more educational and relevant for law students in developing countries by introducing more skills training into the curriculum. Those who support the expansion of clinical legal education in South Africa and elsewhere have sought to achieve specific objectives related to improving legal education for students and providing assistance to economically disadvantaged groups.Legal education is enhanced when it reflects the realities of the citizens within a country, such as South Africa where a majority of the people live in poverty. Clinics and clinical courses promote important values such as equal justice for even the most disadvantaged in society. Clinical legal education also provides an opportunity for students to actually practice lawyering skills such as interviewing, negotiating, and analyzing cases, and to confront ethical issues that arise in real cases. Another objective is to increase access to the legal profession for students from disadvantaged backgrounds in countries like South Africa that require candidate attorneys to serve a legal apprenticeship before attaining admission to the bar, regardless of race and cultural background. Finally, clinical legal education helps to expand the resources for legal representation available to low-income people, especially on issues vital to their survival such as public benefits, shelter, family matters, and civil rights.This Article reviews the development of clinical legal education in South Africa and the valuable lessons such an analysis provides for those seeking to promote clinical legal education elsewhere. The author hopes that a review of the obstacles faced there and the creative ways clinicians have attempted to overcome them, some much more successful than others, will be especially useful.
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