Albie Sachs

thumb|Albie Sachs Albert Louis Sachs OLS (born 30 January, 1935), known as Albie Sachs, is a South African lawyer, activist, writer, and former judge appointed to the first Constitutional Court of South Africa by Nelson Mandela. Quotes When the Law Commission says committal of judgment debtors is an anomaly that cannot be justified and should be abolished; when it is common cause that there is a general international move away from imprisonment for civil debt, of which the present committal proceedings are an adapted relic; when such imprisonment has been abolished in South Africa, save for its contested form as contempt of court in the magistrate's court; when the clauses concerned have already been interpreted by the Courts as restrictively as possible, without their constitutionally offensive core being eviscerated; when other tried and tested methods exist for recovery of debt from those in a position to pay; when the violation of the fundamental right to personal freedom is manifest, and the procedures used must inevitably possess a summary character if they are to be economically worthwhile to the creditor, then the very institution of civil imprisonment, however it may be described and however well directed its procedures might be, in itself must be regarded as highly questionable and not a compelling claimant for survival. Severability is an important concept in the context of the relations between this Court and Parliament; like 'reading down', it is an instrument of judicial restraint which reduces the danger of producing an overbroad judicial reaction to overbroad legislation. Violence of apartheid was just wrong. Terrorism was based on the use of indiscriminate violence, directed at civilian people because they happened to belong to a particular group, race, or community. It was completely antithetical to our ideals. We were fighting for justice against the system of white supremacy, not against a race. All revolutions are impossible until they happen. Then they become inevitable. It's having, a belief that we can make a difference. We can do things, our lives can be meaningful, that it's wonderful to be curious. Curious about the world, to be imaginative, and having hope. You can't force yourself to have hope. You can't drink it from a bottle. But if it’s there, to a very large extent, it's self-fulfilling. It's a positive kind of take on life that reconnects you with your body, and enables you to get a lot of joy out of simply being alive. Quote on hope Everything, in my life has been defined in actions - by politics, by struggle, by existence, by resistance. To cut off from all of that is to surrender to a normality that I’ve never had, and that I never really yearned for. It's to give up the fantasy, the idealism, the imagination, the feeling that there's a world out there where I can do anything that I want to do. And that imagined world is more real and more profound and more significant than the mundane world that we all live in. Quote on existence There's nothing more exciting than being involved in a project that requires intelligence, thoughtfulness, a sense of history, use of language, and collegiality. It is enthralling and tedious and hard, and details matter, and it requires massive research, knowing the record and knowing the arguments; to feel the excitement that you can get through an intellectual project that has enormous public and social meaning. And I wanted to tell that story, I want to tell the story of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Not in a technical literary way. The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter is the both the easiest book I've written, and the hardest because I was still physically so weak. I think it has become my most successful book because it's a bridge between the early part of my life – fighting and resisting apartheid – and the later part of my life as part of the new society with new values, and a new Constitution. It's an emotional connection between different phases of my life, but also an intellectual connection, a bridge head, in a way, for my story, but to some extent paralleling the story of South Africa. The occasion for writing it presented itself very neatly. Blown up on 7 April 1988, out of hospital several months later in London, and I have an invitation to lecture at the law school at the University of Columbia. It was a perfect setting, because I had no other obligations. I enjoyed the teaching. It was contained, and the rest of the time I could write. And now it's just me, my computer, my memory, and I got to produce a draft of the book. Albert Louis work:The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter External links Category:Lawyers from South Africa Category:Activists from South Africa Category:1935 births Category:Living people