The website Open Democracy (tagline: free thinking for the world) conducted an interveiw with me on media freedom, the tripartite alliance and Julius Malema. Listen to it by clicking on this link.
Posts under ‘Seminar Room’
SABC Board Memorandum to Minister
SABC board’s indictment of Chairperson Ben Ngubane
SABC Board
24 August 2010
Media Appeals Tribunal – circa 1977
Politicsweb has puiblished a copy of a media Bill introduced in the apartheid Parliament in 1977, along with a speech of then Minister Connie Mulder and a rather amusing suggestion from James Myburgh that the present government could use the Bill as a template for its proposed Media Appeals Tribunal. Makes one think, doesn’t it?
The 1977 Newspaper Bill
23 August 2010
As [...]
Pierre de Vos: Harold Wolpe Trust talk on Protection of Information Bill
Talk delivered by Pierre de Vos on Tuesday 17 August 2010 at the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust Event
Few people in South Africa will argue with the contention that– in the most exceptional circumstances – the state has a duty to keep secrets. The identity of intelligence agents, details of troop movements or the whereabouts of [...]
Pallo Jordan on racism, “transformation” and the DA
From the Sunday Times:
Mondli Makhanya’s opinion piece “Good work DA – now it’s time to get over your complexion complex” (August 1) reminded me of an incident during the 1980’s when a friend at the Zambian Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) told me of a revealing encounter with power.
The ZBC was planning to air a series, Shoah, [...]
Ronald Dworkin on Elena Kagan
Ronal Dworkin on the confirmation hearing of Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court – article first published in the New York Review of Books
1.
Recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Supreme Court nominees have been a waste of everyone’s time, a parade of missed opportunities. In 1995 Professor Elena Kagan, then of the University of [...]
Legal opinion to Minister of Defence
LEGAL OPINION: INTERIM REPORT
DONE: MINISTRY LEGAL TEAM
The advisory opinion of Advocate Vassen is so incompetently drafted that I need not be longiloquent about its major flaws. It suffices to simply rest on my original document and then refute the crux of Vassen’s argument which is based on a very superficial reading of the constitution.
Vassen relies [...]
Mark Gevisser in The Guardian: “We did it”!
On South Africa hosting the World Cup
Mark Gevisser in The Guardian
Sixteen years after experiencing the unforgettable rush of belonging and relief at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration in 1994, I felt it again last month: at the Free State stadium in Bloemfontein, watching the South African national team play their last World Cup game on 22 June. We beat [...]
“Get over it!” – the wonderful world of Justice Scalia
Get over it! - From the London Review of Books
Corey Robin
BUYAmerican Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by Joan Biskupic
Farrar, Straus, 434 pp, $28.00, November 2009, ISBN 978 0 374 20289 7
Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late [...]
Legal action on lack of textbooks?
No textbooks for some Khayelitsha matrics: Equal Education and learners forced to consider legal action against the Western Cape Education Department
Dear Friends of EE,
Six months into the schools year, at the height of the FIFA World Cup, Equal Education (EE) has been forced to consider legal action in order to ensure that its members, and [...]

