Welcome to the Wits Law School. We pride ourselves on being one of the top law schools in Africa.
Our core business is offering topflight education to our students. Many of our academic staff are leaders in their fields, having written the leading books in such areas as constitutional law, administrative law, the law of persons, HIV/AIDS and the law, gender and the law, jurisprudence, the law of evidence, and criminal procedure. The Wits Law Clinic, the best Law Clinic in the country, provides practical legal training to all our LLB students in various areas of litigation. Our moot students often come first in national and international competitions. We expect high standards of our students and think that this is what they should want for themselves. Currently, the Law School is working on a radical revision of its LLB curriculum to make it more valuable to graduates when they set out on their varied legal and non-legal careers. One of our fundraising thrusts is for scholarships and bursaries for our students. Our staff consist of among the highest complement of black staff at a South African law school.
Among its postgraduate offerings, the Law School has an LLM in a variety of fields, of which the commercial fields are the most popular, especially to legal practitioners. The Law School is committed to increasing its PhD numbers in line with the University’s strategic plan to increase its postgraduate students to half the total student population. Our postgraduate degrees are a major drawcard for students from the rest of Africa, including non-English speaking countries. Our exchange agreements with various American universities allow us to open up opportunities for our students abroad.
The Law Students’ Council has a strong tradition of representing the interests of law students – in order to achieve better education and fairer treatment of students, to help students find jobs on graduating, and to enable socializing and a good time. The Law School is set among green fields and the atmosphere of campus is relaxed and full of laughter. The part of campus on which the Law School Building is set used to be the old showgrounds -- where an annual fair or exposition was held to which for many, many years only whites were admitted. (The Law School Building itself was once the Chamber of Mines building.) The Law School is always aware of where our country comes from and my main wish of law students is that they be committed to an idea of law as serving the community. Most, if not all, of the Wits academic staff believe that they are teaching values of democracy and justice.
The Centre for Applied Legal Studies is a centre within the Law School which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. CALS, as we call it, has advanced the cause of human rights through advocacy and litigation under the leadership of renowned academics and continues to meet the challenge in post-apartheid South Africa. The South African Journal on Human Rights, the most cited of South African journals internationally, is edited from CALS. (The oldest law journal in the world, the South African Law Journal, is also edited – in part – from Wits.)
Wits is situated in the commercial centre of Africa, and the Law School takes advantage of that, especially through the Mandela Institute, a unit which focuses on global economic law. President Mandela gave his name to an economic law institute because he thought that economic law is important to all South Africans in the post-apartheid state. The Institute teaches, arranges conferences and workshops, and does advocacy work that is cutting-edge. One of my main objectives as Head is to increase the intellectual liveliness of the Law School. I want staff and students to be stimulated intellectually and towards that end we have many public lectures and conferences on the timetable. Apart from better teaching, the School’s other major strategic objective is to increase the quality and quantity of its research output. We insist that all staff are research-active and know that this also improves the quality of our teaching. Our library is a magnet for researchers in the region.
The Law School’s official name is the Oliver Schreiner School of Law. Oliver Schreiner was a judge on the Appellate Division who for many years upheld both standards of excellence and a commitment to a better society. He is a worthy example of what the Wits law staff and students aspire to.
Angelo Pantazis,
Head: Law School