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"Our backgrounds before being appointed to the Court could not have been more varied. We were advocates, judges from other courts, and law professors. Some of us had doctorates from top universities, others had studied part-time while working, and one had got his law degree while a prisoner on Robben Island. One had been a court interpreter, another a nurse. One of us lost his sight as an infant, another lost his arm to a bomb placed in his car by agents of apartheid."
"Yet motley as our life and professional experiences had been, we quickly became a warmly collegial and united court. All had resisted in one way or another the cruelty, violence and oppression of apartheid. Many had been directly involved in the creation of our country's new and widely-admired constitution."
"We have no hierarchies or pecking order in our Court. We speak out freely with a view to achieving principled consensus wherever possible. We workshop as a collective again and again, and carry on the debate through e-mail and one-on-one conversations. The objective is to find as much principled common ground as we can. But each one of us has his or her own individual conscience, and when we feel it necessary to differ from our colleagues we do not hesitate to do so. So strongly do we feel about the right to individual expression that we even help strengthen the judgments of colleagues who take positions different from our own!"
"I think we all feel it a great privilege to be on the Court. There can be no greater challenge and no greater pleasure for a judge than to feel part of a generation that lays the foundations of a creative, principled and operational jurisprudence of constitutional democracy that will endure."
Quote from one of the judges
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