2013 Ray Lectures THE COLLEGE OF LAW PROUDLY WELCOMES
JUSTICE ALBIE SACHS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT OF SOUTH AFRICA
Albie Sachs sat in silence for a few moments after he was introduced, and the audience grew silent with him. “It’s November 1991. I’m driving toward the city of Cape Town, and I’m sweating…” he began the story of his involvement in the struggle for equal rights for homosexuals in South Africa. The former Constitutional Court Justice was at the University of Kentucky to deliver his Ray Lecture, The Sacred and the Secular: South Africa’s Constitutional Court Rules on Same-Sex Marriages. In it, he told of the drive to give same-sex couples the right to wed, the opposition, and the eventual ruling by the court that to deny them this basic right was to deny them their personhood under the South African Constitution. Justice Sachs, who was appointed to the Constitutional Court by Nelson Mandela in 1994, began his career in human rights activism at the age of seventeen when, as a second year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. Three years later, he attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown where the Freedom Charter was adopted. He
started practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar when he was 21, the bulk of his work involving defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. In 1966, he went into exile. After spending eleven years studying and teaching law in England, he worked for a further eleven years in Mozambique as a law professor and legal researcher. In 1988 he was injured by a bomb placed in his car by South African security agents, losing an arm and the sight in one eye. After recovering from his injuries, he devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. He returned home in 1990 and took an active part in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. Justice Sachs commemorated his visit to the University of Kentucky by giving Dean Brennen a copy of the South African Constitution, which can now be seen hanging in the law library.
JUSTICE SACHS WITH LEXINGTON MAYOR JIM GRAY AND UK LAW STUDENTS (FRONT): AUBREY VAUGHN, TY MEDARIS (BACK): MAYOR GRAY, DJ LACY, KIRK LAUGHLIN, DALLAS HURLEY, KATE JOHNS
12 University of Kentucky Law Notes