had the strength to continue reading, interviewing and writing this book. It became my main professional focus, and with the help of many others whom I want to thank here, I have been able to immerse myself in Arthur’s life and to write this biography.
This book would have been impossible to research and write without the grant support that I have received for it. For their generous grants I am grateful to the Ford Foundation, its president, Darren Walker, and the staff there with whom I’ve worked; and to the Atlantic Foundations, their president, Christopher Oechsli, and the Atlantic staff with whom I’ve worked. I’m also grateful to Harvey Dale, a good friend of Arthur’s who has more than once helped open doors for me for funding of my South Africa work. Joel Joffe, one of Arthur’s oldest friends, who sadly died while my research was under way, also generously supported this work through his foundation, the Joffe Charitable Trust, and I’m grateful to Joel, his wife Vanetta and the trust’s staff.
A number of trusted friends and advisers provided guidance and assistance to lay the groundwork for the bi-national publication of this book, including Alida Brill, Edwin Cameron, Joe McElroy, Suzanne La Rosa, Joe Spieler and Randall Williams.
New York Law School, my academic home since 1992, also generously aided this work. I’m very grateful to Dean Anthony Crowell for his unstinting personal support for this project, and similarly to Associate Dean William LaPiana. Concretely, New York Law School generously assisted this work with summer research stipends and payment for student research assistance. Stuart Klein and Susan Redler helped with financial arrangements to enable me to receive outside grant assistance; Jody Pariante and Jennifer Khuu helped in many ways with the adjustments, financial and otherwise, that I had to make as a result of my illness. Elise Stone helped with printing the manuscript and sending to me crucial research materials. In addition to the support provided by New York Law School throughout this project, their celebration of the completion of this manuscript on 20 February 2019 allowed me the privilege of sharing and cherishing this accomplishment with my colleagues, friends and family here in New York and abroad, for which I will be eternally grateful.
The librarians of the New York Law School Mendik Law Library, including Camille Broussard, Carolyn Hasselmann and Michael McCarthy, were – as always – quick and efficient in dealing with my many research requests. Jennifer Kuhn, an NYLS student, provided valuable research assistance. Abroad, Gabriele Mohale of the Historical Papers Research Archive at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Cullen Library provided a warm welcome and ready assistance during several days of intense research that my wife and I did there – and also connected me with her sister-in-law Pauline Mohale, a former client of Arthur’s whom I had the pleasure of interviewing. Ruksana Patel-Sussewell, who has her own extensive experience as an interviewer in South African oral history, has worked with great care on the transcription of the interviews I’ve done for this book, a particularly important aspect of the project since I plan to deposit these interviews in research collections for the use of future scholars. She also arranged for the translation of an Afrikaans court decision into English; I’m grateful to her and to the translator for that additional assistance, and to Marco Masotti for suggesting that I work with her.
The Moody-Fessenden family have offered friendship and support throughout the project. The numerous conversations with Drew, LoriJeane, Miles and Susan have helped me to explicate and clarify ideas. Additionally, Drew’s assistance with organising my research notes has been invaluable.
One of the great pleasures of working on this book has been the opportunity to interview many of Arthur’s family members, friends, colleagues and clients. As informative as these interviews were, I still regret that despite my efforts there were a number of people I was unable to reach and speak with; but I was able to interview approximately 120 people in all, from each of the major phases of Arthur’s life. The process of transcribing these interviews is still under way; readers will see that I sometimes cite the transcripts but more often I do not. Where I don’t, I am relying on my own notes, generally made during the interviews themselves.
Many of the interviews are listed in the endnotes and I’m grateful to all of them for their generosity and candour, and for the opportunity to interact, even if only via Skype, with such impressive people. I must especially thank those who spoke with me not once but sometimes many times, and those who helped guide me to other people with whom I should speak. These include Lorraine Chaskalson, Arthur’s widow who herself sadly passed away in 2017; Matthew Chaskalson, Arthur and Lorraine’s older son, and his wife Susie Levy; Jerome Chaskalson, Arthur and Lorraine’s younger son, and his wife Jackie Chaskalson; Sydney Chaskalson, Arthur’s older brother; and a number of Arthur’s friends and colleagues: Penny Andrews, George Bizos, Geoff Budlender, Steven Budlender, Edwin Cameron, Aninka Claassens, Harvey Dale, Dennis Davis, Roman Eisenstein, Adrian Friedman, Joel Joffe, Johann Kriegler, Denis Kuny, Gcina Malindi, Gilbert Marcus, Roelf Meyer, Dikgang Moseneke, Benjamin Pogrund, Kate O’Regan, Richard Rosenthal, Anne Sassoon, Toni Shimoni, David Smuts, and David Unterhalter. Albie Sachs was not only very generous with his time in talking with me about Arthur, but also extremely helpful in making sure that my book and another one in the works, a collection of essays edited by Susannah Cowen, could both proceed without difficulty.
I had the opportunity to present draft chapters of this book to my colleagues at a New York Law School Tuesday faculty scholarship lunch, and I appreciate the helpful comments I received that day. Sheldon Bach offered advice and encouragement at every point. Several other people have read all or most of the entire book in draft and given me very helpful comments on it; these include Matthew Chaskalson, Jerome Chaskalson and Geoff Budlender, and my sister Lucy Ellmann, who took time to read and comment while on vacation and about to edit a book of her own. Over dinner and on walks, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing various aspects of the book with my family, including Lucy’s husband Todd McEwen; my other sister, Maud Ellmann, and her husband John Wilkinson; my son Brian Ellmann and his wife Karen; my younger son David Ellmann and his wife Nivi Rajan; and my daughter Nora Ellmann.
But till now I’ve said little about my wife Teresa Delcorso-Ellmann. Teresa has been involved in every aspect of the creation of this book. She has been an integral part of the research itself, sitting in on and sometimes adding questions during interviews (and remembering answers that I have missed from important and unrecorded conversations), mulling over what we have learned and what it means, managing the technology for the audio and video recordings we’ve been making, reading and commenting on the manuscript, and suggesting ways for me to press forward with the work. At the Wits Cullen Library, she wielded her iPad to take some 4500 photos of documents from Arthur’s files; here in New Jersey she shaped the process of turning my individual chapter files into consistent parts of a single complete manuscript. On the side of all this she’s kept a careful eye on my health. Without her I could not have written this book. I’m grateful for all that assistance, and even more for her sustaining love.
Stephen Ellmann*
February 2019
*Stephen Ellmann died from complications from cholangiocarcinoma shortly after writing these Acknowledgements, on 8 March 2019.
Arthur Chaskalson was born at home on 24 November 1931, in a house on St John’s Road in Houghton, Johannesburg. He was born into comfort, a child of well-off Jewish parents. He seemed marked for success: he would grow up to be tall, athletic, smart, prosperous. In a two-page autobiography he wrote after his retirement from the Constitutional Court in 2005, he remarked: ‘By accident of birth I was privileged, and entitled to all the benefits
