Albie Sachs: Biography and Legal Career of a South African Icon

Nov 06, 2025 0

Albie Sachs is an activist, advocate, writer, and former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa (1994 - 2009). Sachs began practicing as an advocate at the Cape Bar at the age of 21, defending people charged under the racial statutes and security laws of apartheid. His life is a testament to the power of resilience, justice, and the unwavering pursuit of equality in the face of adversity.

Albie Sachs

Early Life and Activism

Albie Sachs was born in Johannesburg in 1933 to Emile Solomon "Solly" Sachs, General Secretary to the Garment Workers' Union of South Africa, and Rachel "Ray" (née Ginsberg) Sachs. Both his mother and father fled to South Africa as children with parents who were escaping persecution against Jews in Lithuania. Sachs shared that at the time they left, the antisemitism had become so violent that "Every Easter, the Cossacks would ride into the villages and say, 'The Jews killed Christ, we're going to kill the Jews.' And my grandparents and others were fleeing into the forests and basements of buildings..."

From an early age Sachs’ father and mother encouraged him to fight against Apartheid, and he joined the ANC when he began studying law. His parents separated when he was a toddler and he moved with his mother and younger brother Johnny to a modest beachside home in Cape Town. Sachs excelled in school and was moved forward two grades, in part due to a shortage of schoolteachers in South Africa during World War II. He attended South African College Schools, where he edited the school magazine, for junior and high school before graduating. He started law school at the University of Cape Town at the age of 15, and won a prize for English in his first year.

The Defiance Campaign

His career in human rights activism started at the age of seventeen, when as a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. On 6 April 1952, white South Africans commemorated 300 years since the arrival of Dutch colonisers, particularly Jan van Riebeeck, who rooted European civilization into the country. Many also celebrated the recent electoral victory of the National Party and the introduction of the word apartheid to the English language. Sachs, then a second-year law student, joined two hundred Black South Africans at a meeting to support the African National Congress (ANC), the National Party's opposition, in a working-class area of Cape Town. The ANC launched their Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws the same day.

Though Sachs was initially told that the Defiance Campaign was a Black campaign led by Black people, he later led a group of young white South Africans to sit in chairs reserved for Black South Africans at the post office. In 1955, Sachs attended the Congress of the People in Kliptown. As part of the opposition, Sachs was subject to predawn raids by the security police and governmental restrictions on his activities, including meeting with more than one person at any given time. He was also banned from publishing.

Legal Career Under Apartheid

While executing his first lawyering job as an Advocate at the Cape Town Bar, Sachs came to see laws as tools “to oppress people, not to protect people.” He started practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar aged 21. The bulk of his work involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many faced the death sentence.

As an attorney, Sachs often represented people accused of violating South Africa’s apartheid laws ensuring racial separation. He was imprisoned and tortured as a political prisoner in the 1960s and lived in exile in England for several years before moving to Mozambique after that country won its independence from Portugal.

Imprisonment and Exile

He was eventually arrested and detained in solitary confinement under the 90-Day Detention Law. He was released after three months but was promptly rearrested and held for an additional seventy-eight days. Sachs barely survived the 90-Day detention. It was the 90-Day Law. You could be locked up for 90 days, and somebody comes to the little cell that I was in and gives me back my tie and my shoelaces and my watch.

Sachs left for England accompanied by Stephanie Kemp, a former client and later cellmate. They married, had children, and continued their anti-apartheid work in the London branch of the ANC. His ANC work brought him to different countries in Europe but he was denied entry to the United States, which regarded the ANC as a terrorist organisation.

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After policy changes, he was able to visit the US, where he attended the Trial of the Chicago 7 at the invitation of the lawyers defending the Black Panthers. Sachs supported Bobby Seale and later met Black Panther leader Huey P. Sachs attended Sussex University with financial aid from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and completed his doctorate in 1970 under Norman Cohn and G. I. A. D. Draper. His thesis, titled Justice in South Africa, was published in both the UK and the USA but was banned in South Africa, with those in possession of it facing prison time.

In 1966 he went into exile. After spending eleven years studying and teaching law in England he worked for a further eleven years in Mozambique as law professor and legal researcher.

Between 1970 and 1977, Sachs was a lecturer in the law faculty at the University of Southampton, where he wrote Sexism and the Law with historian Joan Hoff-Wilson. Sachs moved to the newly independent Mozambique in 1977, where he worked as a law professor at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo and studied Portuguese to fluency. He was later the Ministry of Justice's Director of Research.

While in Mozambique, Sachs visited the ANC headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, at the invitation of Oliver Tambo, where Tambo asked him to draft a code of conduct for the ANC that forbade the use of torture and highlighted the party's democratic principles. During the 1980s working closely with Oliver Tambo, leader of the ANC in exile, he helped draft the organization’s Code of Conduct, as well as its statutes.

Two years later I was picked up again. By then, half of my clients had been picked up and things were much rougher now. And the investigation was much tougher, and sleep deprivation was being used as a major mechanism of breaking people down. It was now called the 180-Day Law. Later on, it became the Terrorism Law. The word “terrorism” was used to justify just locking us up, and we were fighting for freedom, for democracy. But the label was used to justify keeping us in indefinite detention without trial.

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I asked for food at one stage, and I remember them smoking as they gave me the food - and I’m convinced there was something in it, and it emerged afterwards they were using chemicals to break down your resistance. And by early morning, I’m feeling myself getting weaker and weaker and weaker. And my body is fighting my will. So it’s not even them anymore. And they’re working in relays, there were about eight of them, and they’re taking turns, and they can sleep and come back. And the head was a Colonel Swanepoel. “Rooi Rus” (Red Russian) they called him. It’s like he cultivated ugliness.

People had died - I knew that - had died under his interrogations. And then, bam, bam, bam, screaming and shouting and start banging the table, then total quiet. I say, “Albie, you’ve got to manage your collapse. It’s coming. Your clients had sometimes held out for two, three, four, five days and when they broke, they broke completely.” And so now I’m thinking about it, how I can control.

Apartheid in South Africa

The Car Bombing and "Soft Vengeance"

On 7 April 1988, Sachs opened the door to his car and it exploded. Sachs lost his right arm and vision in his left eye, and a passerby was killed. He was stabilized in Mozambique, then flown to London Hospital to recover. There, he received a letter promising he would be avenged. Sachs decided to seek not revenge, but "soft vengeance".

After recovering from the attack, Sachs established and became the founding director of the South African Constitutional Studies Centre at the University of London. He then flew to Dublin to work on the first draft of South Africa's Bill of Rights along with Kader Asmal under the direction of the ANC.

After recovering from the bomb, he devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa.

After the bombing in which he was seriously injured, some of his fellow ANC members promised to “avenge” him. “Is that the country we want?” he said he thought at the time.

“Albie has devoted his life to establishing and preserving democracy, equality and justice,” said Matthew Goff, distinguished research professor of religion, director of graduate studies in the Department of Religion, and the event’s co-organizer.

Sachs was pivotal in the construction of South Africa’s new Constitution. He presently serves as a Justice on South Africa’s Supreme Court, where he still uses his conciliatory skills to empower South Africans during their country’s political, economic, and social metamorphosis.

Justice, Life, and Hope: A Talk with former South African Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs

Return to South Africa and the Constitutional Court

Sachs returned to South Africa in 1990 after the unbanning of the ANC and other political organizations and the release of Nelson Mandela. There, he worked at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in the law faculty with Dullah Omar and was appointed honorary professor at the University of Cape Town after his lecture Perfectibility and Corruptibility. He continued working with the ANC's Constitutional Committee and in 1990 published Protecting Human Rights in South Africa.

In 1990 he returned home and as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the ANC took an active part in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy.

Sachs also served on Working Group Two, which dealt with the nature of the South African State and the process for constitution-making. CODESA negotiations broke down but were later resumed as the Multi-Party Negotiation Process, which led to the drafting of the Interim Constitution. This provided for South Africa's first democratic elections, which would populate its Parliament.

In 1994, following South Africa's first democratic elections, Sachs resigned from the ANC's National Executive Committee and pursued a position on the country's newly established Constitutional Court. He was selected later that year by Mandela as a founding member of the Court.

In addition to his judicial duties, Sachs and Justice Yvonne Mokgoro put together the Court's art collection, which relayed its dedication to humanity and social interdependence in the newly democratic South Africa. His appointment inspired initial controversy, primarily due to his interview with the Judicial Service Commission.

Sachs was appointed to the new Constitutional Court by Nelson Mandela after the country’s first democratic election in 1994.

Key Judgments and Contributions

After the Electoral Commission of South Africa declared that prisoners would be barred from voting in the general elections, the Court considered whether they were denying a fundamental right. The Court unanimously agreed that withholding the right to vote from prisoners was unconstitutional and would be observed only under an Act of Parliament that was compatible with the Constitution. Sachs wrote: "The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy.

Christian Education South Africa v Minister of Education questioned whether Parliament had unconstitutionally limited religious rights by prohibiting corporal punishment in schools. Sachs argued that corporal punishment infringed on the rights of children, and pointed to Section 12 of the South African Constitution, which extends the rights to freedom, security, and protection from "all forms of violence whether from public or private sources." Sachs wrote that "[B]elievers cannot claim an automatic right to be exempted by their beliefs from the laws of the land.

In Port Elizabeth Municipality v Various Occupiers, Port Elizabeth officials filed for the eviction of unhoused people living on unused, private land. In Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie, Sachs wrote the Court's majority judgement declaring that South Africa's statute defining marriage to be between one man and one woman was unconstitutional for not including same-sex couples. He stated that the Parliament was obligated to amend the Marriage Act to reflect the inclusion written into the Constitution and that the Court itself would make the changes if Parliament did not act within a year.

In Laugh It Off Promotions v South African Breweries, the Court held that the parodied use of a trademark on a t-shirt should not be interdicted, because the detriment to the owners intellectual property rights was small and far outweighed by free speech rights. In a separate concurring judgment Sachs wrote, "Does the law have a sense of humor?... A society that takes itself too seriously risks bottling up its tensions and treating every example of irreverence as a threat to its existence. Humor is one of the great solvents of democracy. It permits the ambiguities and contradictions of public life to be articulated in non-violent forms. It promotes diversity. It enables a multitude of discontents to be expressed in a myriad of spontaneous ways.

Volks v Robinson looked at whether a law providing for surviving spouses to receive maintenance from a deceased person's estate was unconstitutional on the grounds that it did not include unmarried cohabitants. S v M brought the Court a case wherein a woman, referred to as M, faced jail time for repeated credit fraud, even while out on bail. Sachs initially planned to dismiss the case but, in talking with his colleagues, he learned that M was a single parent of three teenagers living in an area with high levels of gang and drug activity and violence. She was also the owner and operator of two small businesses and was a member of the school governing board. Sachs accepted the case on the grounds of the children's right to parental care.

“For Albie, revenge meant reconstructing a society founded on laws that represented everyone,” Goff said.

“As a judge, he helped write the Bill of Rights and tackled very technical questions about how to institutionalize justice.

He said, ‘But Grandpa, you lost your arm,’” he said. “I said, ‘But I only lost an arm, and they tried to kill me.’ And I had a total conviction that, as I got better, my country would get better, and it proved to be right.

“We were fighting a system, not a race,” he said. “That is so, so, so vital.

That system, which had not only oppressed and imprisoned black people in terms of their hopes and their possibilities, but imprisoned whites in fear and narrowness and inwardness and arrogance and greed. That’s what liberation meant.

Retirement and Continued Influence

Sachs retired in October 2009 after fifteen years in the Court. Justices Pius Langa, Yvonne Mokgoro and Kate O’Regan also retired. In 2010, he described his judicial career as "joyous and exhilarating, but also exhausting, complicated and problematic."

Sachs has stayed active and in the public eye since his retirement from the Court. Sachs has remained active in his retirement and travels around the world to lecture or act as a consultant. He works to promote restorative justice, gender equality, and constitutional democracy.

In addition to his work on the Court, he has travelled to many countries sharing South African experience in healing divided societies.

Legacy and Recognition

The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs was dramatized by playwright David Edgar for the Royal Shakespeare Company and was televised by the BBC in 1981. In Allan Hutchinson's 2012 book Laughing at the Gods: Great Judges and How They Made the Common law, Sachs is listed as one of the greatest common law judges in history alongside Lord Mansfield, John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., James Atkin, Tom Denning, Thurgood Marshall, and Bertha Wilson.

Hutchinson believes that Sachs' "life and career redefine what it means to be a lawyer and judge in a society that is grappling with the injustices of its past and ameliorating opportunities of its future."

Abby Ginzberg directed and produced the 2014 documentary Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New South Africa about Sachs' life. The film won a Peabody Award. The Askew Student Life Cinema will screen “Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New South Africa,” chronicling Sachs’ fight to end apartheid, on Wednesday, Oct.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice established the Albie Awards to honour activists in different sectors all over the world.

Personal Life

Sachs married his first wife, Stephanie Kemp, a member of the African Resistance Movement, ANC, and SACP, in 1966. They have two children, Alan and Michael, and divorced in 1980. She remained in London for another 10 years and worked as a physiotherapist specializing in the treatment of children with cerebral palsy before returning to South Africa.

Sachs married urban architect Vanessa September in 2006. Their marriage was officiated by Justice Pius Langa. They have one son, Oliver Lukho-u-Thando September Sachs.

Sachs describes himself as "a very secular person" who is respectful of others' beliefs and is proud to identify as a Jew.