Many Roads to Justice: The Law Related Work of Ford ... - UNDP

SO U T H AF R I CA 2 3gressive South Africans, a Ford-funded 1973 conference on“Legal Aid in South Africa” became what many considered awatershed event. The conference at the law school of theUniversity of Natal-Durban (hereafter University of Natal)included experts on legal services and clinical legal education inthe United States, as well as South Africans like Duncan whowere or would become leading human rights activists. Conferencec o - o rganizer David McQuoid-Mason reports that the event “definitelycontributed to the growth of law clinics and new ways ofdoing legal aid here.” Two other participants, John Dugard andFelicia Kentridge, went on to help found two organizations thatwould figure in the fight for justice. Dugard helped launch theCentre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) and Kentridge theLegal Resources Centre (LRC). Dugard views the meeting as “thestart of the idea of public interest law” in his country.One participant’s closing comments, unanimously adopted asa conference policy statement, proved particularly prescient.Sidney Kentridge, a leading commercial and progressive lawyer,noted that “we do have principles of common law which we caninvoke” to prompt landmark judicial decisions, despite parliamentarylegislation being beyond judicial review. 4 And he proposedthe formation of a South African version of the U.S.-basedL a w y e r s ’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—whose executivedirector had addressed the meeting—to carry out reformorientedresearch. Eventually, CALS, LRC, and other granteeswould adopt the approach identified by Sidney Kentridge. T h econference organizers and Ford did not foresee this. What theydid see and seize was the chance to bring together many of thec o u n t r y ’s best progressive legal minds, and to add some foreignintellectual seeds to those already germinating domestically.The seeds planted at the 1973 conference sprouted slowlyover the next several years. Their growth was spurred by the gover n m e n t ’s violent response to uprisings in Soweto and other blacktownships in 1976, and by the gathering storm of the antiapartheidliberation struggle. They were partly fertilized by theF o u n d a t i o n ’s decision to support South African reform moreactively in the late 1970s, by similar initiatives by the CarnegieCorporation and other donors, and by various visits that exposedSouth Africans to U.S. public interest law. “People were very