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.