What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world.
– Albie Sachs in “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom”, in ‘“Spring is Rebellious – Arguments about Cultural Freedom”, 1990.
Albie Sachs, in the preface of his book, The Alchemy of Life and Law, writes about how ‘life prepared [him] in a most bizarre way for becoming a judge’. Sachs’s life is indeed a manifestation of tensions and relations, rather than contradictions: lawyer/ outlaw; justice/ injustice; freedom fighter/ judge; struggle/ laughter; enlightenment/ alchemy. Sachs’ writings and judgments reflect his knowledge of law, art, and literature, but more than that, his insight and care for humanity.
Call for Papers and other Contributions
We invite individual papers, stories, poems and art works as well as proposals for thematic panels from those interested in Sachs’s engagement with law, politics, literature, art, architecture, film and more, taking up these tensions and relations and their (im)possibilities in critical and ‘unexpected’ ways.
Suggested themes
- Judicial decision-making/ judicial interpretation
- Law and activism
- Law and politics
- Law/grace/compassion
- The past/present/future of constitutionalism
- Comparative Constitutionalism
- The common law/indigenous law and the Constitution
- On difference and the right to be different
- Law/art/architecture
- Culture/struggle
- Beauty/Love/Justice
- Socio-economic rights/justice
- Gender Justice
- Children’s Rights
- Religion and the accommodation of the secular and the sacred
- Restorative Justice/Reconciliation/Criminal Justice
The conference will be hosted jointly by the Law Faculties of the University of Western Cape, Stellenbosch University, and the University of Cape Town. It will take place in person on 13 -14 February 2025, in Cape Town, South Africa.
We invite submission of abstracts of no more than 350 words for individual contributions or proposals for themed panels or other events of no more than 600 words on or before 30 August 2024. Submissions can be made online at https://law.uct.ac.za/alchemical-tales-conference-honour-albie-sachs or sent to: sachs.conference@uct.ac.za. Please indicate whether the submission is intended to fall under one or more of the listed themes or under another suggested theme. Please also indicate the nature of the proposed contribution (paper, story, poem, work of art, or other format).
For further information, you may contact Prof Pierre de Vos at 0216503079 or at pierre.devos@uct.ac.za.
