Mhlantla becomes third woman on ConCourt

The anticipated appointment of SCA Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla to the Constitutional Court, announced yesterday by President Jacob Zuma, to fill a post vacant since the resignation of the late Justice Thembile Skweyiya, nearly two years ago, has been a long time coming, notes Legalbrief. As pointed out by Franny Rabkin in a Business Day report, Mhlantla will be the third woman judge on the Constitutional Court. Mhlantla was appointed as a judge in 2002 and to the SCA in 2008. Rabkin says she is known for the judgments she penned as an acting justice of the Constitutional Court. One of these was her judgment in the Rivonia Primary School case, a highly charged matter about the school’s refusal to admit a child, which led to a power tussle between the provincial government and the school’s governing board. Her judgment has been praised for carefully balancing the rights and obligations of the role-players, holding that while the provincial education department had control of admissions, its power had to be exercised reasonably. In the run-up to the JSC interviews for the post, she was criticised by the African Legal Centre for a paucity of reported judgments. But the African Legal Centre said this was ‘offset, in part, by Mhlantla’s productive time at the Constitutional Court’.