Quote of the week
Although judicial proceedings will generally be bound by the requirements of natural justice to a greater degree than will hearings before administrative tribunals, judicial decision-makers, by virtue of their positions, have nonetheless been granted considerable deference by appellate courts inquiring into the apprehension of bias. This is because judges ‘are assumed to be [people] of conscience and intellectual discipline, capable of judging a particular controversy fairly on the basis of its own circumstances’: The presumption of impartiality carries considerable weight, for as Blackstone opined at p. 361 in Commentaries on the Laws of England III . . . ‘[t]he law will not suppose possibility of bias in a judge, who is already sworn to administer impartial justice, and whose authority greatly depends upon that presumption and idea’. Thus, reviewing courts have been hesitant to make a finding of bias or to perceive a reasonable apprehension of bias on the part of a judge, in the absence of convincing evidence to that effect.
Livesey v The New South Wales Bar Association [1983] HCA 17; (1983) 151 CLR 288
LLM scholarships for 2016 at UCT Law Faculty
Claude Leon Foundation Scholarships in Constitutional Governance 2016
2 LLM scholarships (R80 000 each for 2016)
Prof Pierre de Vos, the Claude Leon Chair in Constitutional Governance at the University of Cape Town Law Faculty, invites suitably qualified applicants to submit applications for the above post-graduate scholarships. The successful applicants will be South African citizens who plan to embark on Master’s degree by dissertation in 2016 in the fields of South African or comparative Human Rights Law, Constitutional Law or other legal and political questions relating to constitutional governance, constitutionalism, rights discourse or the promotion of social justice – including topics that require interdisciplinary research. The dissertations will be supervised by the Chair in Constitutional Governance.
- The successful applicants will have an excellent academic record. In making the selection, the selection panel will strive to select a cohort of recipients broadly representative of South Africa’s racial and gender composition.
- The scholarship will be awarded for a period of one year;
- The selected scholars will be required to provide reasonable research assistance to the Chair in Constitutional Governance; and
- The selected scholars will be expected to live in Cape Town or surroundings to be reasonably present at the University of Cape Town.
For further information contact: pierre.devos@uct.ac.za or 021 6503079.
Applicants must send a covering letter providing motivation for the application, accompanied by a full curriculum vitae with the names and contact details of three referees, all available undergraduate degree transcripts and a short (no more than one page) proposal indicating the possible topic of the post-graduate research to: pierre.devos@uct.ac.za by no later than 25 May 2015.
