Personal details
Khayelihle Kenneth Mthiyane was born in Ndwedwe, KwaZulu-Natal, on 13 September 1944. He attended school in Durban and matriculated by private study. He is married to S'Thandiwe Phyllis Mthiyane (born Khuzwayo), with whom he has four daughters.
Education
Mthiyane obtained the B.Iuris degree from UNISA in 1972. He obtained an LL.B in 1984 and an LL.M in 1994, both from the University of Natal, Durban.
Professional history
Mthiyane was admitted as an attorney in 1975 and later established K. K. Mthiyane and Company, a law firm in Durban dealing mainly with public interest and political cases, apart from general commercial, civil and criminal cases involving litigants from the then disadvantaged communities.
Mthiyane joined the Durban Bar in 1984 and took silk in 1995.
During 1995, he chaired two Commissions of Enquiry which investigated racism at the University of Zululand and the then University of Durban Westville.
In the last term of 1995, Mthiyane served as an Acting Judge in the Ciskei Division of the Supreme Court at Bhisho.
In 1997, he headed the three-person Mthiyane Commission which investigated corruption, racism and other irregularities in twenty-two provincial hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal with a view to establishing clean governance. The report and the recommendations of the Commission resulted in the abatement chaos that had threatened to destabilise service delivery in the province and a number of dismissals and prosecutions followed.
In 1997, Mthiyane was appointed as a Judge of the Natal Supreme Court, and in 2000, he served as an Acting Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal.
In 2001, Mthiyane was appointed as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal.
In 2002, he was appointed as the Chairperson and Head of the Electoral Court.
Since 2006, Mthiyane has served as the Vice-Chairperson of the Rules Board for Courts of Law in South Africa.
During May 2008, Mthiyane served as an Acting Judge in the Supreme Court of Namibia.
In 2011, Mthiyane was appointed as an Acting Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.
Other activities
- Mthiyane has served as the chairperson of the Durban branch of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers.
- He has also served as an instructor and part-time lecturer at the Practical Training School for attorneys at Howard College, University of Natal, run by the Association of Law Societies, where he taught supreme court practice and procedure.
- Leading up to the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, Mthiyane actively participated in providing legal assistance and voter education to the (until then) disenfranchised communities.
- Member of the Council of the University of Pretoria, as donor representative, for seventeen years, and was and still is, an assessor member of the Faculty of Law of the University of Pretoria.
- He serves as a Council Member of The Beatrice St Congregational Church in Durban.
- Mthiyane is involved in sport and in various other community activities, and he enjoys reading, gym and golf.
Personal details
Keoagile Elias Matojane was born in Soweto and is married with three children
Education
Matriculated at Madibane High School in 1981
B Proc (University of Zululand) 1986
LLB (University of Zululand) 1988
LLM (University of Johannesburg) 1995
LLM (University of South Africa) 2007
Advanced diploma in Company Law (University of Johannesburg) 2001
National Diploma in Trial Advocacy ( University of Colorado, Boulder. USA. 1994
Professional history
Admitted as an Attorney (1991)
Admitted as a Conveyancer (2000)
Right of appearance in the High Court (1995)
Judicial positions
Acting Judge of the Cape of Good Hope (2007 - 2008)
Acting Judge of the South Gauteng Division of the High Court (2009)
Appointed Judge of the South and North division of High Court (2009)
Judge of the Land Claims Court (2014)
Acting Judge President of the Land Claims Court (2014)
Acting Judge of the Constitutional Court (2015)
Other Activities
Conducts trainings in Trial Advocacy under the auspices of the BLA Education Centre.
Jody Kollapen is a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa from July 2017 and has served as a Judge of the High Court of South Africa, Gauteng Division, Pretoria, since 2011. As a High Court Judge, some of Justice Kollapen’s celebrated judgments include Hennie and Others v Minister of Correctional Services and Others in which he granted an urgent interdict allowing prisoners to use laptops in their cells for study purposes. Justice Kollapen also presided in the Limpopo textbooks case in which he reprimanded the National Education Department and its Limpopo counterpart for its failure to deliver textbooks to schools in the province and handed down a structural order outlining deadlines for textbook deliveries. He was also the Chairperson of the South African Law Reform Commission. Prior to his appointment as a Judge, Justice Kollapen served as the head of the South African Human Rights Commission. Justice Kollapen previously practised as an attorney and joined the organisation, Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) where he coordinated the “Release Political Prisoners” programme, which championed for the rights of political prisoners. In 1995, he was appointed National Director of the LHR. While working as an attorney he worked on important cases such as Sharpeville Six and the Delmas Treason Trial. He was also a member of the selection panel that chose the Commissioners for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Justice Kollapen has previously served as a lecturer at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. Moreover, he has served on the board of many civil society organisations, including the Legal Resources Centre, the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, IDASA, and the London based Article 19.
Personal details
John James Trengove was born in Stellenbosch on 3 October 1919. He is married to Izabel (formerly Erasmus). They have four children and fourteen grandchildren.
Education
Trengove matriculated at Stellenbosch Boys’ High School (now Paul Roos Gymnasium) in 1936. He graduated from the University of Pretoria (as an extra-mural student) with a BA Degree (cum laude) in 1944 and his LLB degree (cum laude) in 1946.
Professional history
From 1946 to 1966 Trengove practiced as an advocate, becoming Senior Counsel in 1960. During this period he served on the Pretoria Bar Council (as Chairman in 1966) and also on the General Council of the Bar of South Africa.
From 1967 to 1978 he served on the Transvaal Provincial Division of the Supreme Court and on the Appellate Division from 1978 to 1986.
After taking early retirement at the end of 1986 he served on the Courts of Appeal of Lesotho and Swaziland and also as an Acting Judge on the High Courts of Botswana, Namibia and for one term on the Constitutional Court of South Africa.
Other activities
- National President of FAMSA (National Council for Marriage and Family Life) for about five years.
- National Chairman of NICRO (National Institute for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of Offenders) for about two years.
- Member of the Board of Trustees the Legal Resources Trust.
- Member of the Council of the University of Pretoria, as donor representative, for seventeen years, and was and still is, an assessor member of the Faculty of Law of the University of Pretoria.
- Set up the Office of the Judicial Inspectorate, and served as the first Inspecting Judge for a period of three years.
- Awarded a LLD Degree (Honoris Causa) at the University of Pretoria, and a Laureate Award by the Association of Alumni of the University of Pretoria.
Personal details
Fritz Brand and his wife, Elaine, currently lives in Bloemfontein. He has two sons and a daughter.
Education
Brand grew up in the Western and Northern Cape where he received his primary and secondary education. Over the period 1968-1974 he studied at the University of Stellenbosch and the University of Leyden in the Netherlands. He holds the qualifications BA LL.B and LLM (cum laude).
Professional history
Immediately after receiving his LL.B degree at the end of 1972, he was appointed as senior lecturer at the law faculty of the University of Stellenbosch where he taught until the end of 1976. In 1977 he joined the Cape Bar where he practiced as an advocate until September 1992. During that period he served on the Cape Bar Council for about ten years. In November 1989 he received his letters patent as a senior counsel (SC). In September 1992 he was appointed as a judge of the High Court in Cape Town. After serving as an acting judge of appeal at the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein in November 2000, he was appointed permanently to that court with effect from 1 December 2001. In 2010 he was appointed as an acting judge to the Constitutional Court for two terms, retaining his permanent position on the Supreme Court of Appeal bench.
Other involvements
Brand retained his interest in academic life. He has been a visiting lecturer at a number of universities in South Africa and abroad. On two occasions he also spent time as a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and Comparative Law in Hamburg, Germany. At present he is an Extraordinary Professor in Private Law at the University of the Free State.
Brand is Chair of the Vereniging Hugo de Groot, the body responsible for the Tydskrif vir Hedendaagse Romeins-Hollandse Reg. He has contributed to joint publications by South African and foreign lawyers, mainly from the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen in Scotland. He has also published in the South African Law Journal and in LAWSA, where he took responsibility for the titles Defamation and Enrichment in the current edition.
Brand is also interested in judicial education. For that purpose he has attended various courses and has conducted many seminars for judges in South Africa and in other African countries.