Legal Alchemy
Albie Sachs is a remarkable man. His official bio begins
On turning six, during World War II, Albie Sachs received a card from his father expressing the wish that he would grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation.
He began that fight as a seventeen year old law student; as a lawyer, the bulk of his work involved defending people charged under apartheid’s racist and repressive security laws – many of them faced the death penalty. As a result he was harassed by the security police, detained in solitary confinement for two prolonged spells of detention, tortured by sleep deprivation, forced into exile in 1966, and in 1988 blown up by a car bomb which cost him his right arm and the sight of an eye. In exile, he worked as an academic in the UK and Mozambique, campaigned for human rights and an end to apartheid, and thought deeply and wrote widely about the role of law as a protector of human dignity in the modern world. He wrote many of the ANC’s constitutional documents, helped to negotiate South Africa’s transition to constitutional democracy and to draft its post-apartheid Constitution, and was one of the founding judges of the Constitutional Court in 1994.…