As South Africa celebrates 30 years of its Constitution, the next generation of lawyers has been challenged to carry forward one of the world’s proudest legal traditions — and to treat their legal education not as a ticket to personal success, but as a duty to society.
Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, Andries Nel, delivered the keynote address at a Career Day for Law Students at Stellenbosch University, held under the theme “The Constitution at 30: Preserving Nelson Mandela’s Legacy of Equality and Justice”, SAnews reports.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Nel, himself a law graduate, urged students to draw guidance from the legal trailblazers who fought for constitutional and human rights for all South Africans — among them former President Nelson Mandela, Advocate Duma Nokwe, Oliver Tambo, Priscilla Jana, former Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs, and human rights lawyers Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge.
“South Africa has a very proud history of lawyers who had devoted themselves to justice. They came from many different backgrounds… But they shared a conviction that the law must serve justice. When the law was used as an instrument of oppression, they reclaimed its moral purpose. When the courts enforced injustice, they used the courtroom as a site of struggle and resistance.”
The Deputy Minister acknowledged that today’s practitioners face different challenges from those of the apartheid era, but said the tradition of public interest law is alive and well. “We now have a whole new generation of public interest lawyers who’ve continued in that struggle,” he told the students.
A Question for Every Graduate
The question each student must answer, Nel said, is what they will do — individually and collectively — with South Africa’s Constitution.
“You will answer that question not only through what you believe but what you choose to do with your legal education, because the law is not merely a profession, it is a public trust. That public trust is now passing to you,” he said.
The milestone gives the message special weight. This year South Africa commemorates the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution — a document Nel himself helped shape as a member of the constitutional parliament at the time.
“Thirty years ago, we made a very profound choice as a nation to choose constitutional supremacy over arbitrary power,” he reflected. “But constitutions do not defend themselves, rights do not enforce themselves, the rule of law does not preserve itself — people do.”
And it is people of integrity, courage and knowledge, he told the packed career day — people who understand that legal knowledge carries a responsibility to society — to whom that task now belongs.
For the students of Stellenbosch’s law faculty, housed in a university with one of the country’s oldest legal programmes, it was both a celebration of how far South Africa’s constitutional democracy has come, and an invitation to write its next chapter.
Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
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