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Contact:
Kathleen Carroll Parvis
Phone: 314.977.7248
parvisk@slu.edu

November 11, 2004

Saint Louis University School of Law is pleased to announce that Arthur Chaskalson, chief justice of South Africa, will be this year's 12th annual James C. Millstone Memorial lecturer.

Chaskalson will discuss “Can a Constitution Really Guarantee Socio-Economic Rights?” at noon Monday, Nov. 22, in the Kniep courtroom of Morrissey Hall. He will speak about his country’s apartheid system, the negotiations that led to its abolition and the impact their post-apartheid constitution has had on South Africa’s law and government.

Chaskalson also is president of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, which seeks to promote human rights around the world. For the last three years he has been a judge in the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, where the defendants include Slobodan Milosevic.

As a young lawyer in 1963-64, Chaskalson helped defend Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress in the infamous Rivonia trial, at which Mandela and seven others were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1978, he helped found the Legal Resources Centre, a human rights advocacy group he then directed for 15 years. In 1993, Chaskalson helped draft the transitional South African Constitution. The next year, Mandela appointed him as the first President of South Africa’s new Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land on constitutional matters.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Laclede Garage. For more information, call (314) 977-3074.