Call for Papers and other Contributions
What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world.
Albie Sachs in Preparing Ourselves for Freedom, in Spring is Rebellious – Arguments about Cultural Freedom, 1990.
For conference information, you may contact Prof Pierre de Vos at 0216503079 or at pierre.devos@uct.ac.za.
The conference programme is available here for easy download.
Please note that the conference opens at 12h45 on Weds 12 February and ends with a late afternoon celebratory event on Fri 14 February.
Venue: Kramer Law Building, Cross Campus Road, Middle Campus, UCT
If you have not done so yet, please register for the conference as soon as possible, but no later than 5 February.
A conference registration fee of R1200 is payable on registration.
Students are exempted from paying the fee, but are also required to register.
The conference will take place at the Kramer Law Building on Middle Campus, University of Cape Town on 12 - 14 February. Please arrive by 12h45 on Wednesday 12 February, so that we can start promptly at 13h00.
Parking will be available in the car park above Cross Campus Road, and in the car parks below the Kramer Building.
On arrival, please sign in at the registration desk on the Level Two of Kramer Building (follow the conference signage,or ask security). Your conference lanyard and name tag will give you access to refreshments during the conference, and guest wifi will be available at registration for those not already on eduroam.
The rooms that will be used for the conference are Lecture Theatre Three (LT3) on Level 2 and Classrooms 4A and 4B on Level 4. Tea and coffee will be served in 2B (Level 2).
We are aiming for an environmentally friendly event and therefore we will not be giving out water bottles. Please bring your own refillable bottle. Water will be provided.
You can find male & female bathrooms on every floor of the Kramer building. There are also gender neutral bathrooms in the south west corner of Level 4.
Albie Sachs, in the preface of his book, The Alchemy of Life and Law, writes about how ‘life prepared [him] in a most bizarre way for becoming a judge’. Sachs’s life is indeed a manifestation of tensions and relations, rather than contradictions: lawyer/ outlaw; justice/ injustice; freedom fighter/ judge; struggle/ laughter; enlightenment/ alchemy. Sachs’ writings and judgments reflect his knowledge of law, art, and literature, but more than that, his insight and care for humanity.
We invite individual papers, stories, poems and art works as well as proposals for thematic panels from those interested in Sachs’s engagement with law, politics, literature, art, architecture, film and more, taking up these tensions and relations and their (im)possibilities in critical and ‘unexpected’ ways.
Suggested themes
The conference will be hosted jointly by the Law Faculties of the University of Western Cape, the University of Stellenbosch, and the University of Cape Town. It will take place in person from 12 -14 February 2025, in Cape Town, South Africa.
Proposal submissions are now closed.