Courting Justice – A DVD on the Constitutional Court

Description

From apartheid to democracy. What is essential for transformation to succeed?

South Africa’s answer: a constitution acclaimed for its promise of comprehensive human rights, an independent judiciary to guard those rights, and a judiciary, transformed by race and gender, able to render justice and claim a lost legitimacy. Women were to wear judicial robes. Their appointments, however, moved at a slow pace. By 2008, fourteen years after the gate to transformation were flung open, women held only 18% of the superior court seats. Courting Justice is the story of these women.

It is told by six women judges while at work in their court rooms and chambers, at home and in the communities where they lived during apartheid. We learn how they confront the challenges – of women working in a male institution, of mothers integrating work and family, of judges burdened with extraordingary heavy case loads, of judges deciding the fate of those who come before them. It is a very personal story – at the same time, however, it reveals the demands on the courts as they work to advance democracy and it contrasts the state of justice in South Africa, then and now.

From apartheid to democracy. What is essential for transformation to succeed? As necessary as the constitution and an independently transformed judiciary are the people charged with transformation responsibility. What qualities must they possess? Courting Justice answers this question, and in doing so inspires admiration for the women judges we come to know.