Special Hearings — Legal Hearings — 1997-10-27

MR LAX: Thanks, Chairperson. As I've been sitting listening to you and Carole Lewis earlier, something has just struck me and it may seem incredibly trite, but it seems - and it's apropros your comment about Roman law and about how Roman academics behaved or Roman lawyers behaved, would I be putting it too tritely in a sense if I was to suggest that what we seem to be lacking in legal education is a holistic view of law and the culture of human rights?
We break it up into private law and into public law, into this law and into that law. We have so many disparate little bits and pieces and pigeon holes that none of it all fits together. So the culture of human rights doesn't permeate into the whole body of teaching the law, and should we not be teaching law in a more holistic way that engenders the culture of human rights throughout?
 I mean, we say the law of contract doesn't operate say in constitutional sense in a vertical way, but if we were to encourage people's perceptions of human rights it may well do, at a general level, not in terms of a strict legal sense.

UNKNOWN: Yes, you're absolutely right. I think one way of dealing with that and I think the law schools are doing it, but certainly we're trying to do it and that is first of all, just at the teaching level, I mean, to try and put across knowledge it's easier to do it in compartments and then try and bring it together afterwards, but you've got to stop people thinking permanently in those compartments.
 But what we're trying to do for instance is getting every single lecturer to look at his or her course and see how is the human - how has the constitution, Bill of Rights impacted on their course to start off with. That's the first thing.
 The thing also that brings it altogether is when you actually deal with real people, because people don't come and hear and say this is a taught problem, this is a contract problem and they come in with their experience as well. So, the legal skills we're going to do, is clinical teaching, but also stuff like client care and counselling. When a client comes in, you've got to relate. They're the most important people. We never teach our students about clients. So, one of the things we're starting is a client-interviewing competition which we hope and we're going to now join the international client-interviewing competition, where someone comes in and you're going to be judged about how do you relate to that person as a human being as well and how do you deal with their non-legal problems, the psychological, sociological baggage they bring with them as well.
 So, we need to look at people more holistically. So what we're hoping with these skills courses is to start doing this type of stuff as well. It's not simply abstract compartmentalised dry sort of legal stuff in the books.

YASMINE SOOKA: Thank you. Thank you very much for the contribution. I think all of us were struck by the creative way in which you certainly have tried to teach law. I don't think any of us has not been exposed to the booklet on street law and I think if more of that kind of thing could actually happen you'd find that law would become more real for ordinary people on the ground.
 So, we certainly have found this very useful, because I think the challenge for the legal profession is certainly going to be at university level, because that's where people are first exposed to the kind of teachings about whether you go the positivist way or find a creative way of being courageous in the way you practice law.
 I think what we do want to make sure of is that people are able to speak up in the future, because we're only emerging now from the sense of things having gone wrong, but that doesn't mean that that's still not carrying on and I think it's quite interesting that more people are dying in custody now. The statistics are quite frightening. So one needs to think a lot of these things.
 Thank you very much for your contribution.
 I'd like to call the Legal Resources Centre now, please. Professor Majola, we'd like to welcome you to this hearing. I know you've had quite a long wait today. We have allowed other people to run over a little bit.
 Before you being, I'm going to ask you to take the oath. Ntsebeza, would you like to administer?

MR NTSEBEZA: Just for the record your full names.

BONGANI MAJOLA: I am Bongani Majola.

BONGANI MAJOLA: (Duly sworn in, states).