Lourens Ackermann

Lourens Wepener Hugo "Laurie" Ackermann (14 January 1934 – 25 May 2024) was a South African judge who served on the Constitutional Court of South Africa from 1994 to 2004. Appointed to the inaugural court by Nelson Mandela, he is best known for his jurisprudence on dignity. He was formerly an academic, a practising advocate, and a judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa.

Born in Pretoria, Ackermann practised at the Pretoria Bar between 1958 and 1980, gaining silk status in 1975. He served as a judge in the Transvaal Provincial Division of the Supreme Court between 1980 and 1987, when he resigned due to his opposition to apartheid legislation. After five years as a professor in human rights law at Stellenbosch University, he returned to the Supreme Court in 1993, sitting in the Cape Provincial Division until he was elevated to the Constitutional Court in August 1994. He retired from the judiciary in January 2004.

Early life and education Ackermann was born on 14 January 1934 in Pretoria in the former Transvaal. Both of his parents were Afrikaners, but he was raised bilingual. He matriculated from Pretoria Boys High School in 1950 and attended Stellenbosch University, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts in law in 1953.

Apartheid-era career In the first half of 1958, Ackermann clerked for Justice Faure Williamson of the Supreme Court of South Africa. Ackermann later said that he left the bench when, partly due to the influence of human rights law expert Louis Henkin, he came to endorse a "total rejection of apartheid" and of the sovereignty of the apartheid-era Parliament. The court's first term began in February 1995 and Ackermann sat in the court until his retirement in January 2004.

Ackermann played a central role in the development of the court's early jurisprudence on dignity and its relationship to equality and non-discrimination doctrine. He was also renowned for his expertise in comparative constitutionalism. He was described as a judicial maximalist, and Drucilla Cornell argued that his jurisprudence was strongly Kantian. Notable judgments written by Ackermann included National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality v Minister of Justice and National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality v Minister of Home Affairs, historic judgments on sexual-orientation discrimination which set the precedent for the subsequent legalisation of same-sex marriage in Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie.

Retirement and other activities After his retirement, Ackermann founded the South African Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law, a research institute at the University of Johannesburg. In 2012, he published Human Dignity: Lodestar for Equality in South Africa'', a monograph which expounds the theoretical and constitutional background to the relationship between dignity, equality, and non-discrimination.

Ackermann was formerly the chairperson of the board of governors of Pretoria Boys High School and he was later the South African secretary of the Rhodes Trust from 1988 to 2003. Stellenbosch University awarded him an honorary LLD, and he is an honorary fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.