A Texture of Legality: The Legal Profession in South Africa, v 1
Presentation at Law’s Locations: The Textures of Legality in Developing and Transitional
Societies, organized by the Research Circle on the Role of Law in Developing and Transitional
Countries, held on 23-25 April 2010, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jonathan Klaaren, School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
(jonathan.klaaren@wits.ac.za)
Introduction
This presentation moves towards a contextualized analysis of the working of the legal
profession in South Africa. Such an analysis might well challenge some conventional understandings
and forge new knowledge about law actually works in developing and transitional countries. In line
with the thrust of Law’s Locations workshop, three emphases will be kept in mind: first, the
presence and immanence of the legal profession in the daily lives of persons; second, the available
movement between and the engagement with plural legal orders including global ones (see e.g.
Berman 2007, Goodale and Merry 2007); and third, the way in which the profession is shaped
through the course of its history.
First, I argue that what we know about the legal profession in South Africa has been in a
sense over contextualized, indeed skewed. Second, I show that work on the South African legal
profession is only now beginning to emerge but that such work is indeed happening from several
different angles. Third, this presentation will outline what more we should know. While the
literature is too extensive and diffuse to adequately survey in the course of preparation for this
presentation, this outline aims to contribute towards such a survey.
Point One
What we know about the legal profession in South Africa has been in a sense over
contextualized, indeed skewed. This is partly due to a gap in the literature. South Africa has been
missing from the standard historical comparative work on the legal profession. The extensive work
of Richard Abel is a clear case in point here. Despite Abel’s careful and formative attention to South
Africa in his Politics by Other Means (1995), the country is missing from his historical and
comparative work (Abel 1988a, 1988b)! Even taking into account Pruitt’s careful study (2002) and
Chanock’s chapter on the profession in the early 20th century(Chanock 2001: 221-240), there seems
nothing on South Africa to compare with Abel’s work on the English legal profession (Abel 2003).
Furthermore, what attention to the legal profession there has been has largely focused on
two issues: representation in the profession and the role of law with respect to apartheid. With
respect to representation in the profession, the attention has been largely to issues of
transformation understood in terms of race (Pruitt 2002, Godfrey 2009) with some but lesser
attention being paid to gender. On the question of the role of law in respect of apartheid, the
lawyers have certainly come in for some examination (White 1988, Broun 1999), but the bulk of
scholarship on lawyers under apartheid has been of a jurisprudential nature (Budlender 1988,
Dyzenhaus 1998), even where such analyses have explicitly valued everyday lawyering as well as
impact cases (Budlender 1988). Likewise, Meierhenrich’s account of anti-apartheid lawyering
attends particularly to the effects of such lawyering on the legitimacy of the legal system
(Meierhenrich 2008: 208-217). Combining these two concerns, Albie Sachs presented a short pen
portrait of ‘Brown and Black Lawyers in Action’, including accounts of the Treason and Rivonia Trials
(Sachs 1973: 205-229).
So, one question to pose is why did this skew in the literature happen? To some extent the
work in these two strands – representation and the role of law in apartheid -- has stood in for
contextualized historical comparative accounts of the legal profession. We see here an example of
the pull of the policy audience (Sarat and Silbey 1988). There is a further factor arguably operative
as well. Further, there are two sources of scholarship on the legal profession in comparative
jurisdictions that are missing in SA. One comparable source for literature on the legal profession is
state funding for empirical research on the administration of justice. The UK provides a clear
contrast with South Africa on this score, where the policy audience itself has historically been weak
(but see Law Society of South Africa 2008). However, this distinction may be lessening with the
greater involvement of national competition authorities (including those of South Africa) in assessing
and regulating the markets for legal services (Abel 2003, Competition Authority 2006, Competition
Bureau 2007). The second is the lack of substantial and sustainable nationally focused sociolegal
scholarship. South Africa does not currently have a similar organization to the UK Sociolegal Studies
Association or the American Law and Society Association.
This point regarding the literature on the legal profession clears the ground to engage with
the concerns of the workshop, to locate the legal profession in South Africa.
Point Two
Historically grounded and comparatively aware work on the South African legal profession is
only now beginning to emerge but such work is indeed happening from a few different angles. One
angle updates and builds on the apartheid-era concerns with demographic representation and the
role of law and lawyering. One study has extended the transformation concerns into issues of skills
development and transfer as well as racial and gender representation (Godfrey 2009). Another
study has investigated representation trends and dynamics within different segments of the legal
profession (Shefer-Prahm and Klaaren, 2010). Other work has emphasized the perspective of
systemic access of justice (AfriMap 2005, Klaaren 2009). From this access to justice angle, some
work has directly argued for professional policy innovations, such as the successful call for a system
of public defenders (Ogletree 1995). A final theme takes the role of law under apartheid in a
different direction, investigating postapartheid lawyering from the perspective of legal mobilization
(Dugard 2008, SAJHR 2010). This work has not yet but might fruitfully engage with the question of
transplanting the American public interest litigation paradigm to South Africa and developing
countries (Hershkoff 2009, Ellmann 1998, Oko 2004).
Another angle is that of history. Any thick historically rooted description of the legal
profession in South Africa will be indebted to Martin Chanock’s work on the development of legal
culture from 1902 to 1936 (Chanock 2001: 221-240). Focusing on the profession’s struggle for status
and income, Chanock treats topics such as status and competition, the formalist voice of the
profession, the profession and the public, and access by Africans to legal services. Indeed, Chanock
concludes that “there were … many ways of being a South African lawyer in this period, and many
ways of imagining what that might mean” (Chanock 2001: 240).
A third angle is only beginning to emerge and constitutes research framed in terms of South
Africa’s participation in the global market for professional services (Klaaren 2007, 2009). Here, the
legal profession is beginning to be analyzed in terms of skills (Godfrey 2009) and the South African
legal services market is unlikely to be an exception. One particular focus for this research has been
and is likely to continue to be the Legal Practice Bill (Department of Justice and Constitutional
Development 2009).
Point Three
Despite the work to date and the research that is currently emerging, there is much more
that we should know in order to locate the legal profession in South Africa. What should be on the
research agenda towards a contextualized study of the South African legal profession? The following
is a non-exhaustive set of items.
To begin with the question of representation, Lisa Pruitt’s work provides a bridge to
exploring the dynamics of representation in the profession (Pruitt 2002). Indeed, as the best
contemporary investigation into the question of black representation in the profession, the
interviews Pruitt conducted as well as her secondary research into questions of remuneration, firm
structure, and candidate attorney training could well be profitably updated from her research period
of 1999-2000. While Pruitt has drawn on earlier work of Wilkins and Gulati (Pruitt 2002: 597-602),
one could additionally investigate the dynamics of the black corporate bar itself (including its
relationships with clients) (CASE 2008) as well as investigate the trajectories of early career lawyers,
the latter akin to the Harvard Legal Professions Project research project on After the JD.
Not far from such a start is a profession-wide question that is not being addressed: that of
big firm competition and increasing intra-profession inequality. In parallel with the increasing
inequality in general South African society, the legal profession has recently seen concentration a
the top and a consequent increase in the gulf between the top and the bottom of the profession.
Both the national gap and the development of arguably divergent practices in the circle of elite law
firms bear investigation (Liu 2006). Another question that is also raised in the context of elite
corporate practice, at the least, is that of legal outsourcing, as for instance investigated in India
(Ballakrishnen 2009).
Expanding the focus beyond the practicing profession, attention for future work may well be
directed at the institutional stepchildren of the legal profession: legal education as well as
government lawyering. The persistent object of study, legal education is currently undergoing
examination from methods including those of critical discourse analysis (Humby in progress),
reflective clinical legal education (Mahomed in progress), and quantitative surveys on perceptions of
legal education within the profession as currently being conducted by the Council on Higher
Education at the request of the Law Deans. Future work on government lawyering could expand
beyond the units of the prosecutors and the new Legal Aid Board to also examine more in-house
forms of government lawyering practice.
Picking up on the theme of historical contextualization, large scope exists to move from the
current macro histories to the micro level. One example could be a thick contextualization of a
controversial talk given by a prominent advocate such as Wim Trengove at UCT in the wake of the
Hlophe and Zuma controversies. In another tack, one could explore the roots of a specific field of
law, such as administrative law, in a set of sector specific dynamics, such as those obtaining in
immigration, where several different bureaucracies attempting to regulate the mobility of various
populations.
Finally, as the media is having a field day with a number of questions of ethics, a fruitful line
of inquiry could well be to explore legal ethics and their construction in everyday practice (Liu 2006).
In a recent prominent example, newspapers have reported on the actions of a highly respected
government lawyer soliciting a five million rand bribe (Independent Online 2010).
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