Our Team
Nurina Ally, Director
Nurina Ally is the Director of Centre for Law and Society and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Law. She is a specialist in constitutional and administrative law, and her research interests include movement lawyering, public interest litigation, socio-economic rights and children's rights. Prior to joining the Faculty's Department of Public Law, Nurina served as the Executive Director of the Equal Education Law Centre, a public interest law organisation based in Cape Town. Before this, Nurina practised as an associate and senior associate in the public law department of Webber Wentzel Attorneys. She has also served as a research clerk to Justice Cameron and Acting Justice Mhlantla of the Constitutional Court.
Nurina obtained her BA and LLB undergraduate degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she graduated as the most distinguished scholar in law. She also holds a Masters degree in African Studies from the University of Edinburgh as well as a Masters of Studies degree in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University.
Jemima Thomas, Administrative Officer
CLS Administrative and Finance Officer. Jemima joined CLS in July 2013 responsible for the management of the Centre's budgets and timely reporting of financials to our funders.
Research Associates
Michael Bishop
Michael Bishop is a practicing advocate and a member of the Cape Bar. He holds a BA LLB and LLM from the University of Pretoria, and an LLM from Columbia University. Michael is the Managing Editor of the leading text on South African constitutional law – Woolman’s Constitutional Law of South Africa – the managing Editor of the Constitutional Court Review, and an editor of the new looseleaf publication Brickhill’s South African Constitutional Law. Michael previously worked as a law clerk to Chief Justice Pius Langa, and as in-house counsel at the Legal Resources Centre. He appears regularly in constitutional matters in the High Court, Supreme Court of Appeal, and the Constitutional Court. His interests include all aspects of constitutional law, but particularly constitutional remedies.
Leo Boonzaier
Leo Boonzaier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Private Law at Stellenbosch University. From 2021 to 2025, he worked in the Department of Private Law at UCT. He specialises in delict, private law theory, and constitutional theory. His completed CLS-affiliated projects include ‘The Constitutional Court’s efficiency: Statistics from the Mogoeng era, 2010–2021’ (2022) 12 Constitutional Court Review 317 and Edwin Cameron: Influences and Impact (Pretoria University Law Press, 2025), both with Nurina Ally.
Jason Brickhill
Jason Brickhill (Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Public Law at UCT), is an academic and a practising advocate. He holds an LLB from UCT (magna cum laude, top student) and a Masters in International Human Rights Law (with distinction) and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. His DPhil thesis on the impact of strategic litigation in South Africa was awarded the Subedi Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in law at the University of Oxford. Jason has led the litigation teams of the Legal Resources Centre and the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI). He appears frequently in South African courts, including the Constitutional Court, and he has served as an acting judge of the High Court. He is the editor-in-chief of South African Constitutional Law. Jason teaches economic, social and cultural rights at Masters level at the University of Oxford, where he is an academic affiliate of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and an associate member of the Trinity College Senior Common Room. His research interests lie in constitutional law broadly, including in particular access to justice, socio-economic rights, and strategic litigation and its potential to contribute to social change.
Vanya Gastrow
Vanya Gastrow is a Senior Researcher in the Justice and Violence Prevention Programme at the Institute for Security Studies and is involved in the programme’s Evidence-Based Policing Project. She holds a BA LLB and Mphil (Private Law) degree from the University of Cape Town, and a PhD in Migration Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand. Vanya has worked as a qualitative researcher in the field of law and society for over a decade with a particular focus on migration, policing and access to justice. She is the author of the book Citizen and Pariah: Somali Traders and the Regulation of Difference in South Africa.
Rebecca Gore
Rebecca Gore is a Research Associate at the Centre for Law and Society. Rebecca obtained her Bachelor of Social Sciences (PPE), Post-graduate Honours (Transitional Justice) and LLB from the University of Cape Town. Rebecca also holds a Master of Laws (LLM) from Harvard Law School, where she was awarded the Henigson Fellowship for her demonstrated commitment to international human rights work and the Dean’s Scholar Prize from Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic. Previously, Rebecca was the legal researcher for the Inspecting Judge of the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services, Justice Cameron, and a law clerk at the Constitutional Court in the Chambers of Justice Cameron, Justice Majiedt, and Justice Mhlantla. She has interned for The Presidency of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and various public interest organisations in South Africa. Rebecca’s research interests are broad and include criminal justice reform, gender-based violence, international law, human rights, constitutional law, and constitutional theory.
Tatiana Kazim
Tatiana is a legal advisor at SmartStart South Africa, working with the national Department of Basic Education (DBE) on reform of the law relating to early childhood development.
Tatiana is currently studying for an LLD in Public Law with Professor Sandra Liebenberg at Stellenbosch University. Her doctoral studies focus on the obligations of private actors in relation to socio-economic rights. She holds a Bachelor of Civil Law (LLM-equivalent) and an undergraduate law degree from the University of Oxford and a politics and philosophy degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before joining EELC, Tatiana worked as a Research Fellow at the Public Law Project in the UK. She has also been a judicial assistant at the Court of Appeal of England and Wales and a legal assistant at the Law Commission of England and Wales.
Dan Mafora
Dan is a Senior Researcher at the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution. He is also the author of Capture in the Court: In Defence of Judges and the Constitution (Tafelberg, 2023) which was longlisted for the 2024 Sunday Times Literary Awards (Non-Fiction Prize). Previously, he served his articles of clerkship at DLA Piper South Africa with exposure to corporate law, banking and finance, data protection, and general commercial law. Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice Mbuyiseli R. Madlanga at the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Pretoria and has recently concluded an LLM in constitutional theory from the University of Cape Town. His research interests are broadly in constitutional and administrative law, general jurisprudence, constitutional theory, judicial politics, and corporate law.
Nicola Palmer
Dr Nicola Palmer is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Law. She has written on international criminal law, border control and legal pluralism with support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Leverhulme Foundation and the British Academy. Nicola is the author of Courts in Conflict: Interpreting the Layers of Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda (OUP, 2015) and the co-editor of Critical Perspectives in Transitional Justice (Intersentia, 2012).
Nicola undertakes research in international criminal law and the sociology of international law, with a focus on two major workstreams. The first examines the interactions among plural legal responses to large-scale violence with a specific focus on Rwanda. The second examines the epistemic communities that determine the boundaries of the responses to this violence. In the first workstream, her current work examines the intersections of international criminal law and refugee and immigration-related regulation. In the second, she is writing on the use of ethnographic and qualitative research in contributing to critical, decolonial and Third World theorising in international law.
Nicola’s work has been published in the London Review of International Law, Theoretical Criminology, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law and Transnational Legal Theory. She was previously a Reader in Criminal Law at King’s College London and the Global Justice Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, before returning to her home country, South Africa, to join the UCT Law Faculty. She received her DPhil in law from the University of Oxford in 2011, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to this, she worked at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UN ICTR), having completed her undergraduate and honours degrees in law and economics at Rhodes University, Makhanda.
Sanya Samtani
Dr Sanya Samtani is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Law. Sanya completed her DPhil and BCL at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar (India and Magdalen 2015), and her BA LLB (Hons.) at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.
While at Oxford, Sanya was a tutor in public international law, a Research Associate at the Oxford Human Rights Hub, and a Graduate Research Resident at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. Sanya also served as a foreign Law Clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa in 2018.
Following the completion of her DPhil, Sanya secured a National Research Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the SARCHI Chair of International and Constitutional Law at the University of Pretoria. She then spent approximately three years at the University of the Witwatersrand as a Senior Researcher in the Mandela Institute, conducting research supervision and lecturing on international law, constitutional law and human rights law courses. She has also taught an elective course as a Visiting Lecturer at her alma mater, NALSAR University of Law.
Fundamentally, Sanya’s research aims to understand how discrete legal regimes interact with one another internationally and domestically and study the impact of this interaction on creating, reifying and remedying inequality. She explored this in her DPhil thesis in the context of intellectual property and human rights. Her research considered the role of copyright as a barrier to accessing educational materials in the global South by analysing the international and domestic legal regimes and associated institutions that operate to create the problem and that are capable of rectifying it. Sanya's forthcoming monograph, Access norms in tension: copyright and human rights in international and domestic law, will be published by Brill in late 2026.
Sanya has acted as an academic advisor to NGOs and disability groups on national litigation in the High Court and Constitutional Court and the South African government on international litigation in the International Court of Justice. Her research at the intersection of intellectual property and human rights has also fed into parliamentary law reform driven by disability groups in South Africa.
At UCT, Sanya teaches on the international and constitutional law courses on the LLB programme and on the international law modules on the LLM programme. She is open to supervising students in her core fields of interest which include critical approaches to international law, international dispute settlement, regime interaction, the relationship between international and domestic law, constitutional law, human rights law, and access to knowledge.
A full list of her publications is available at ResearchGate and ORCID.
Research Assistants
Ozzy Aromin
Ozzy finished his LLB at UCT in 2025 cum laude. He is currently pursuing an LLM (Constitutional and Administrative Law) while working as a Public Law Teaching Assistant (Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure) at the same institution. His research interests are broadly in Administrative Law and Criminal Justice, and specifically in: judicial review, procedural fairness, good governance, and access to justice.