And Justice For All. Stephen Ellmann

       Finding his Course

      In mid-1956 Arthur Chaskalson began the practice of law. Over the next seven years his life would change profoundly. He would go from being a novice advocate to having an impressive and successful practice, and in the process would find a happy fellowship with the other members of the Bar. He would briefly become a member of a political party, the strongly anti-apartheid Liberal Party, but almost as quickly leave this membership behind; meanwhile he would become involved in non-party, but anti-apartheid, political activity that at least bordered on illegality. Even in the field of law itself, he would approach the limits of what law allowed. Important as these developments were, they were only a part of the transitions Arthur was making. Though he remained primarily a commercial lawyer, he began to take political cases, which would assume growing importance in his life. And he would meet and marry the woman with whom he traversed the rest of his life. His life changed professionally and personally; and the two were inevitably connected.

      Arthur may have begun his career at the Bar as a ‘pupil’ or apprentice. Years later, in a 2009 interview with Adrian Friedman he said that at that time one or two people might have organised pupillage for themselves, but it was an absolute rarity. But the minutes of a Johannesburg Bar Council meeting on 19 April 1956 include the following:

       APPLICATION BY CHASKALSON TO BE A PUPIL

       The Chairman reported that Chaskalson had been to see him to ask whether it would be in order for him to do devilling before he is admitted to the Bar.

       It was agreed that the Secretary should inform Chaskalson that if he is prepared to pay a fee of £25 he may become a pupil of a junior member of the Johannesburg Bar.

      It seems that Arthur was himself one of the rare new advocates of that period who organised pupillages for themselves. But it is also possible that in the end he chose not to pay the fee of £25, and instead simply began his practice.

      At any rate he was permitted to join the Bar in 1956 and did so. He joined the group of advocates that came to be known as Group 621. At the time, Johannesburg advocates had their chambers in His Majesty’s Building, but the Bar moved to another building, Innes Chambers, in 1961,¹ and Arthur’s recollection is that the group took its name from its location on the sixth floor of Innes Chambers. Group 621 was one of the most prestigious groups, and included a number of leading members of the Bar. These included Bram Fischer, a more senior advocate with whom Arthur would become very close; Fischer, who made his Communist political convictions clear, was also a beloved and respected leader of the Johannesburg Bar. Another member of the group was Sydney Kentridge, not as senior as Bram but already recognised for his exceptional ability; he too would do distinguished work in political cases against the government, and he and Arthur would be friends and colleagues for decades. The fact that Arthur was able to join this distinguished company must have indicated that reports of him from Wits and from his articles of clerkship were very positive.

      Arthur did well at the Bar from the first. Not everyone shared his good fortune; new advocates had to wait for attorneys to bring them briefs. Fanie Cilliers, a friend of Arthur’s at the Bar for many years, recalled, ‘The rank junior’s group fees were about R35 per month, and a day in the magistrates’ court would earn him R12.50’² – so that a young advocate without cases could be in a difficult position indeed. Browde and Selvan, in their ‘largely anecdotal history’ of the Johannesburg Bar from 1940, write that after World War II ‘conditions got better, but even so, survival at the Bar by a newcomer who did not have independent means or a particular following among litigation attorneys was a struggle’. Advocates without cases, they recall, played cards in chambers, went to the movies, or played ‘occasional games of cricket in interleading chambers in His Majesty’s Building’.³ Arthur’s friend Mark Weinberg remembers playing cards with Joe Slovo; when Slovo went into exile (where he would go on to become the chief of staff of the ANC’s guerrilla forces, Umkhonto we Sizwe), the other card players were dismayed because Slovo was so in debt to them at the time. Weinberg himself left the Bar and returned to the Side Bar as an attorney, before leaving South Africa and ultimately making a successful business career in Britain.

      Arthur may well have had ‘independent means’ because of the success of the family’s mattress company, but he also had ‘a particular following among litigation attorneys’. Arthur acknowledged that he had achieved a very good LLB degree, in a class that had been very good, and that he and his colleagues came to the Bar with some sort of reputation as good lawyers – but that doesn’t fully explain his individual success. Joel Joffe remembered that Arthur and their mutual friend Sydney Lipschitz were undoubtedly the two outstanding young advocates of that moment. Because of the focus of his articles of clerkship, he had become an expert in insurance law, and his former supervisor from his articled clerk days, Charlie Johnson, sent him work. Arthur himself remembered getting referrals from a range of other people, including young attorneys with whom he was friendly – these would have included Rusty Rostowsky and perhaps other former members of the Wits tennis group – as well as one of his uncles, who was an attorney. He told Adrian Friedman that he didn’t know how you built up your practice; it just happened. Meanwhile, in his first year at the Bar, as we have seen, he was invited by Professor Ellison Kahn of Wits to write the annual entry on insurance law for the Annual Survey of South African Law. He acknowledged in an interview that he was quite young to receive such a prestigious invitation. He wrote the Annual Survey’s insurance article every year from 1957 to 1971, undoubtedly building his reputation for expertise in this field in the process. Over his first years in practice, the great majority of his reported cases (those in which the matter went to court and was resolved with a judicial opinion that was actually published, a discretionary matter in South Africa at the time) seem to have been quite apolitical – though, as we will see, there were a few striking exceptions.

      Among his early cases was one in which Arthur and George Bizos represented the opposing parties. Arthur and George at this stage were friendly acquaintances at the Bar; their lifelong friendship had not yet been sealed. In this case, George’s client claimed that the goods Arthur’s client had supplied him were worthless, and on that ground asserted he was entitled to complete rescission of the contract between them. But the case took some time to go forward, and it occurred to Arthur to have the contractual items counted. The count revealed that George’s client had in fact used some of the supposedly worthless goods, because they were no longer present in inventory. In fact, two successive counts revealed that the client had done so twice.

      It’s worth emphasising that Arthur thought that this client’s behaviour was funny. Over the years some people would see Arthur as quite a severe, even intimidating presence – but actually he had a generous and even whimsical sense of humour. Rosemary Block, a friend of the Chaskalsons from the 1960s on, recalled that many of his early briefs were accident cases (no doubt because of his expertise in insurance law). He used to have little cars on his desk so that his clients could show him what had happened. When I think of Arthur with toy cars on his desk in chambers, I think also of many years later, when Adrian Friedman interviewed him for his biography, and the discussion of important issues kept being interrupted by the arrival of the Chaskalsons’ several cats, each of whom had to be welcomed by Arthur to the scene.

      He also liked the life of the Bar. Years later he would tell Adrian Friedman that the Bar’s common room ‘was a great centre … a great meeting place’ and that

       most people would lunch in the common room very regularly. There might be some who didn’t want to, but most people went to the common room regularly. You could sit at any