the other card players were dismayed because Slovo was so in debt to them at the time. Weinberg himself left the Bar and returned to the Side Bar as an attorney, before leaving South Africa and ultimately making a successful business career in Britain.
Arthur may well have had ‘independent means’ because of the success of the family’s mattress company, but he also had ‘a particular following among litigation attorneys’. Arthur acknowledged that he had achieved a very good LLB degree, in a class that had been very good, and that he and his colleagues came to the Bar with some sort of reputation as good lawyers – but that doesn’t fully explain his individual success. Joel Joffe remembered that Arthur and their mutual friend Sydney Lipschitz were undoubtedly the two outstanding young advocates of that moment. Because of the focus of his articles of clerkship, he had become an expert in insurance law, and his former supervisor from his articled clerk days, Charlie Johnson, sent him work. Arthur himself remembered getting referrals from a range of other people, including young attorneys with whom he was friendly – these would have included Rusty Rostowsky and perhaps other former members of the Wits tennis group – as well as one of his uncles, who was an attorney. He told Adrian Friedman that he didn’t know how you built up your practice; it just happened. Meanwhile, in his first year at the Bar, as we have seen, he was invited by Professor Ellison Kahn of Wits to write the annual entry on insurance law for the Annual Survey of South African Law. He acknowledged in an interview that he was quite young to receive such a prestigious invitation. He wrote the Annual Survey’s insurance article every year from 1957 to 1971, undoubtedly building his reputation for expertise in this field in the process. Over his first years in practice, the great majority of his reported cases (those in which the matter went to court and was resolved with a judicial opinion that was actually published, a discretionary matter in South Africa at the time) seem to have been quite apolitical – though, as we will see, there were a few striking exceptions.
Among his early cases was one in which Arthur and George Bizos represented the opposing parties. Arthur and George at this stage were friendly acquaintances at the Bar; their lifelong friendship had not yet been sealed. In this case, George’s client claimed that the goods Arthur’s client had supplied him were worthless, and on that ground asserted he was entitled to complete rescission of the contract between them. But the case took some time to go forward, and it occurred to Arthur to have the contractual items counted. The count revealed that George’s client had in fact used some of the supposedly worthless goods, because they were no longer present in inventory. In fact, two successive counts revealed that the client had done so twice.
It’s worth emphasising that Arthur thought that this client’s behaviour was funny. Over the years some people would see Arthur as quite a severe, even intimidating presence – but actually he had a generous and even whimsical sense of humour. Rosemary Block, a friend of the Chaskalsons from the 1960s on, recalled that many of his early briefs were accident cases (no doubt because of his expertise in insurance law). He used to have little cars on his desk so that his clients could show him what had happened. When I think of Arthur with toy cars on his desk in chambers, I think also of many years later, when Adrian Friedman interviewed him for his biography, and the discussion of important issues kept being interrupted by the arrival of the Chaskalsons’ several cats, each of whom had to be welcomed by Arthur to the scene.
He also liked the life of the Bar. Years later he would tell Adrian Friedman that the Bar’s common room ‘was a great centre … a great meeting place’ and that
most people would lunch in the common room very regularly. There might be some who didn’t want to, but most people went to the common room regularly. You could sit at any table, it didn’t matter whether there you were a silk or a junior … There were often mixed tables – silks, juniors, younger juniors and older juniors and it was truly a great place – people would talk, meet and discuss and anybody who had done anything wrong would be up for conversation – your reputation was very public at that time.4
Many advocates shared Arthur’s view of the Bar. Jules Browde SC, another of the leading anti-apartheid lawyers of the day, would write:
That we [advocates] are able to survive the stresses and strains of practice is in large measure attributable to the friendship and fellowship of our colleagues. At the Johannesburg Bar there is a long-standing tradition that any member of the Bar will readily come to the assistance of a colleague who has a problem or difficulty, often setting aside his own urgent concerns to do so. Apart from this, life at the Johannesburg Bar has through the years been made pleasurable by the kindness and cordiality of colleagues.5
Moreover, this fellowship largely transcended politics. Arthur recalled his friend Fanie Cilliers saying to him one day, ‘You are a very dangerous person who should either be the Minister of Justice or in jail!’ When I asked him about this, Cilliers didn’t remember it, but he felt it reflected that politics didn’t much matter within the Bar, which was a truly meritocratic institution where talent was recognised. More than one person has called the Johannesburg Bar of this era, or its common room, the best club in the country – though that compliment, as we will see in a moment, implies a serious critique as well.
The positive view of the Bar was not universally held. Dikgang Moseneke would later write in his autobiography that the Bar in the 1980s ‘was a little more racially tolerable and yet at its core it was an old boys’ club. The cream of the crop was white, male and well pedigreed … They were well heeled financially, they owned their world and they were, by and large, arrogant.’6 Arthur was not arrogant, but he was white, male and well pedigreed, and well heeled financially. He enjoyed the fellowship of the Bar. Many years later, Albie Sachs, in interviews with me, would emphasise that advocates, though colleagues, were capable of playing tricks on each other – within the rules, to be sure – for tactical advantage, and he would recall Arthur, on the Constitutional Court, every so often coming out with a strong laugh in response to some witticism of the competitive-advocate style. Arthur was much more than a comfortable member of the Bar, but he was that as well.
If the fellowship of the Bar to some extent transcended politics, nevertheless the Bar encountered politics. Arthur would recall that ‘The Johannesburg Bar, though part of the white establishment, was, however, never seen as a bastion of apartheid. It retained a concern for the rule of law, protested against some of the worst laws that were passed, supported members who defended those charged with political offences, and was viewed with suspicion by those who ruled the state.’7 Browde and Selvan note that ‘a number of statements were made by the Johannesburg Bar from the year 1951 condemning legislation which it regarded as inimical to the values that the Bar supported’.8 No doubt Arthur, already firm in his opposition to apartheid, supported these efforts. As he began to take political cases, he surely also benefited from the Bar’s commitment to supporting its members when they did such work. He would go on to become a recognised leader of the Bar, serving as a member of the Johannesburg Bar Council from 1967 to 1971 and from 1973 to 1984. He would also, as we will see, rely on the Bar’s support to authorise the departure from conventional rules of practice (specifically, the separation of advocates and attorneys) entailed in the creation of the Legal Resources Centre.
At the same time, it seems fair to say that Arthur’s own engagement in anti-apartheid efforts did not emerge, full-blown, at the moment he was called to the Bar. In 1956, as Arthur was beginning his own practice, so too Duma Nokwe, the first black member of the Bar, was beginning his. Nokwe faced a special problem – it was illegal for him to occupy chambers in the advocates’ building, because that building was in an area restricted to whites. As Browde and Selwan write, George Bizos, a friend of Nokwe’s from law school,
volunteered to share his room with Nokwe and they continued to share chambers from 1956 up to the year 1962. By so doing all concerned including the Bar Council risked prosecution. It is to their credit that the leaders of the Bar and of the eighth floor group [of which Bizos was a part] … were prepared on a question of principle to take that risk. In the
