To Live Outside the Law you Must be Honest: Bram Fischer and the Meaning of Integrity

ABSTRACT

It is often suggested that anti-apartheid South Africans' use of the old order's courts in the course of their struggle contributed to the new South Africa's commitment to the rule of law. At the same time, it is widely felt that apartheid South Africa's laws were so illegitimate that moral citizens were not obliged to obey them, and indeed were entitled to take up arms against them. Could a lawyer who chose to break the law at the same time contribute to the ideal of the rule of law? Bram Fischer, whose life has recently been compellingly recounted in a full-length biography by Stephen Clingman, followed a moral path that eventually brought his ethical duty as a lawyer and his moral duty to end apartheid into conflict, and in the end chose to breach his duties as a lawyer in order to meet his responsibility as a human being. This article argues that although it is impossible to know with certainty how Fischer's choices affected other anti-apartheid lawyers, or how those other lawyers' choices to obey or disobey the law affected the strength of the rule of law in post-apartheid South Africa, still we have reason to think that his example taught the ultimate importance of achieving a legal system to which men and women, black and white, could be faithful. Fischer's honesty, his commitment to principle, even as he broke the law resonates across the decades that have passed since he made his choices.