The Most Famous
JUDGES from South Africa
This page contains a list of the greatest South African Judges. The pantheon dataset contains 53 Judges, 1 of which were born in South Africa. This makes South Africa the birth place of the 13th most number of Judges behind Slovakia, and Ghana.
Top 2
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary South African Judges of all time. This list of famous South African Judges is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity.
1. Richard Goldstone (b. 1938)
With an HPI of 49.15, Richard Goldstone is the most famous South African Judge. His biography has been translated into 16 different languages on wikipedia.
Richard Joseph Goldstone (born 26 October 1938) is a South African retired judge who served in the Constitutional Court of South Africa from July 1994 to October 2003. He joined the bench as a judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa, first in the Transvaal Provincial Division from 1980 to 1989 and then in the Appellate Division from 1990 to 1994. Before that, he was a commercial lawyer in Johannesburg, where he entered legal practice in 1963 and took silk in 1976. He is considered to be one of several liberal judges who issued key rulings that undermined apartheid from within the system by tempering the worst effects of the country's racial laws. Among other important rulings, Goldstone made the Group Areas Act – under which non-whites were banned from living in "whites only" areas – virtually unworkable by restricting evictions. As a result, prosecutions under the act virtually ceased. During the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy in the early 1990s, he headed the influential Goldstone Commission investigations into political violence in South Africa between 1991 and 1994. Goldstone's work enabled multi-party negotiations to remain on course despite repeated outbreaks of violence, and his willingness to criticise all sides led to him being dubbed "perhaps the most trusted man, certainly the most trusted member of the white establishment" in South Africa. He was credited with playing an indispensable role in the transition and became a well known public figure in South Africa, attracting widespread international support and interest. Goldstone's work investigating violence led directly to his being nominated to serve as the first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda from August 1994 to September 1996. He prosecuted a number of key war crimes suspects, notably the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. On his return to South Africa he took up a seat on the newly established Constitutional Court of South Africa, to which he had been nominated by President Nelson Mandela. In 2009, Goldstone led a fact-finding mission created by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the Gaza War. The mission concluded that Israel and Hamas had both potentially committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, findings which sparked outrage in Israel and the initiation of a personal campaign against Goldstone. In 2011, in the light of investigations by the Israeli forces which indicated that they had not intentionally targeted civilians as a matter of policy, Goldstone wrote that if evidence which had been available later had been available at the time, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.
2. Mandisa Maya (b. 1964)
With an HPI of 36.12, Mandisa Maya is the 2nd most famous South African Judge. Her biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
Mandisa Muriel Lindelwa Maya (born 20 March 1964) is the Chief Justice of South Africa. She was formerly the President of the Supreme Court of Appeal from 2017 to 2022 before she was elevated to the position of Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa in September 2022. She joined the bench in May 2000 as a judge of the Transkei Division of the High Court of South Africa and was elevated to the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2006. Born in the Eastern Cape, Maya began her legal career in the Transkei, working as a prosecutor and state law adviser until she was admitted as an advocate in 1994. President Thabo Mbeki appointed her to the Mthatha High Court in May 2000 and to the Supreme Court of Appeal in June 2006. In the appellate court, she was elevated to the deputy presidency in September 2015 and the presidency in May 2017, succeeding Lex Mpati in both positions. She was the first black woman to serve in the Supreme Court of Appeal, as well as the court's first woman deputy president and first woman president. Maya was nominated unsuccessfully for elevation to the Constitutional Court in 2009 and 2012, and President Cyril Ramaphosa controversially declined to confirm her nomination as Chief Justice of South Africa in March 2022. In September 2022, however, Ramaphosa appointed her as the first woman Deputy Chief Justice, in which capacity she deputised Raymond Zondo. She was the president of the South African chapter of the International Association of Women Judges from 2018 to 2023, and she was appointed as the Chancellor of the University of Mpumalanga on 1 July 2021. In July 2024, Ramaphosa appointed Maya as South Africa's first female Chief Justice, effective 1 September 2024.
People
Pantheon has 2 people classified as South African judges born between 1938 and 1964. Of these 2, 2 (100.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living South African judges include Richard Goldstone, and Mandisa Maya. As of April 2024, 1 new South African judges have been added to Pantheon including Mandisa Maya.
