The Institutionalization of Legal Ethics in South Africa: The Double Movement of Profession and Higher Education

This chapter investigates how legal ethics have been institutionalized in South Africa. The account given spans from the post-apartheid heyday of the 1990s to 2018 through to the present day. 2018 was the year in which the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014 was finally brought into more or less full effect (even if not institutionally implemented) – aiming to put the governance and institutions of South Africa’s legal profession onto a new legal foundation. This chapter’s focus is thus on institutionalization of legal ethics as part of and subsequent to the transition from apartheid to South Africa’s current constitutional democracy. Legal ethics develops as a regulatory field and a research topic in different ways in different regimes. In South Africa, key actors in the post-apartheid development include the law deans (not directly subject to the profession) and the leaders of the profession in practice, in particular those from the sub-field of attorneys. Since the transition to constitutional democracy, a dialectical process has played out between legal education and the organized legal profession over the prominence and place of legal ethics. Tied up with a slow pace of institutionalization, neither sub-field has demonstrated much change on the ground and this double movement shows little sign of abating.