Tributes for a legal luminary
ALEXANDRA - Both students and lectuers of a Constitutional law Course in Alexandra heap praise on the late former Chief Justice Pius Langa.
The late former Chief Justice Pius Langa was praised for a job well done and for his visionary leadership which took into account the concerns and fears of the downtrodden.
Langa, who died a two weeks ago and was buried in Durban, came in for praise during the graduation ceremony of 18 community leaders in Alexandra who recently completed a paralegal course in Human Rights and Constitutional Law.
The course jointly organised by Edward Nathan and Sonnenbergs law firm and the Constitutional Court Clerks Alumni Association and facilitated by Renaissance Strategic Solutions, whose CEO Kim Robinson described the late Chief Justice as “a legal luminary”.
“Chief Justice Langa had one of the most intricate understandings of our supreme law of the land and interpreted in such a fashion that even a humble layman in the street would be able to understand and comfortably associate with.
“His judgments were both scholastic and full of insight that enabled even a man on the street to understand the man’s vision and interpretation of our fundamental law,” said Kathyn Serafino-Dooley of the alumni as she read some of the pronouncements of his judgments.
Serafino-Dooley described Chief Justice Langa as a man who placed a paramount importance on the value of education and often imparted this to the youth, including his own children, “encouraging them to read, read and read, and learn, learn and learn all the time”.
He also believed that democracy would be null and void without the continuous involvement and participation of the public in the day-to-day affairs of their government. “Such direct participation by the citizens of the country in decision-making gives democracy the meaning and provides the much needed impetus for a democratic society,” Serafino-Dooley said Langa would often say.
One of the graduates of the course Benjamin Chisari of the Community Policing Forum quoted one of the profound statements the former Chief Justice made, in which he said: “Our courts in South Africa have recognised the impact of inequality in our society. We have acknowledged that because of our past, ours is a glaringly unequal society. There is extreme poverty side-by-side with great wealth; there is homelessness side-by-side with large concentrations of property in the hands of a few.
“We have stressed that while the conditions of extreme inequality persist, the wonderful promises of the constitution will remain a distant dream for the majority of our people.”
