Basic HTML Version
189
Law in Context
Professor Hugh Corder
Hugh Corder, a graduate of the universities of Cape Town, Cambridge and Oxford, has been Professor of Public Law at
UCT since 1987. His main teaching and research interests fall within the field of Constitutional and Administrative Law,
particularly judicial appointment and accountability, and mechanisms to further administrative accountability. Professor
Corder has been widely involved in community work since his student days, concentrating on popular legal education,
race relations, human rights and the abolition of the death penalty. He served as a technical adviser in the drafting of
the transitional Bill of Rights for South Africa. He has written three books, edited a further seven, and contributed many
articles and chapters in books.
Researcher Profile
Professor Corder had a busy and productive 2012,
of which two research projects representing different
aspects of his areas of interest are highlighted here.
For him, research in law tends to be a solitary activity.
Although he has occasionally written with others, and
although he has also been part of a research team,
usually for short periods of intense activity (such as
drafting a bill for Parliament), his preferred position is to
read, reflect and write on his own. The works highlighted
below represent the outcome of both sorts of research.
His work in the area of constitutional law, and his
particular focus for the past 35 years, has been the
judicial branch of government, as well as a specialised
area of constitutional law called administrative law,
which is any legal system’s response to the rapid growth
and intrusiveness of executive authority over the last
century. It typically centres on the courts’ attempts to
regulate the exercise of that power to ensure a measure
of procedural fairness.
The first piece is a substantial chapter for a book
on the judiciary in South Africa. The editors asked
Professor Corder to write on judicial accountability,
a particularly vexed topic, for the following reasons.
Judicial impartiality and independence are critical to any
constitutional democracy, but judges exercise authority
on behalf of the state in interpreting and enforcing laws,
so there must be methods to ensure their accountability
to the electorate. One of the ways in which this occurs
is through the doctrine of the “separation of powers” in
government, and through the role of the executive and
Parliament in appointing judges. This chapter focuses
on accountability mechanisms for serving judges, such
as that they sit in open court, that their judgments are
criticised by other lawyers, academics and in the media,
that judgments may be appealed to higher courts, and
that judges who are guilty of gross misconduct may be
impeached. Most of the chapter examines the structures
and procedures introduced recently into our law by
Parliament, such as a binding Code of Conduct as well as
tribunals established under the auspices of the Judicial
Service Commission. One such notorious incident
involves a judge who was found guilty of drunken driving,
and whose case will soon be heard by a tribunal.
The second piece is a chapter in a book (edited by leading
constitutional scholars from Australia, Switzerland and
the USA) which seeks at an international level to explore
themes common to constitutional law in a comparative
manner. Professor Corder was twinned with a Swedish
academic, and they were asked to write about access to
information, a vital part of administrative justice in any
modern system of constitutional governance. Sweden
was the pioneer in this area, South Africa very much a
latecomer, and the authors approach the issue from very
different legal and cultural vantage points, so there was
much of interest in the writing process. It is hoped that
the outcome will be equally stimulating!