Fellowships for Law Clerks and Civil Society Lawyers

Since 1998, the Constitutional Court Trust has been administering fellowships for selected former clerks of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court of South Africa and, more recently, young civil society lawyers to study towards postgraduate law degrees abroad.  

The Franklin Thomas Fellowship, named after the first Black president of the Ford Foundation, is the most enduring of the fellowships, having run consistently for nearly three decades. The purpose of the Franklin Thomas fellowship is to provide an opportunity for a South African who has clerked of the Constitutional Court of South Africa to study at an American university towards a one-year graduate programme leading to a Masters of Law (LLM) degree.

In recent years, two new fellowship programmes were established for applications from exceptional young South African and African lawyers who have worked for a South African NGO in a legal programme focused on constitutional and human rights law.

The Pius Langa Memorial Fellowship at UCL, established in 2021 in partnership with University College London (UCL) Laws and the South African Constitutional Court (United Kingdom), honours Pius Langa, the late Chief Justice of South Africa.

The Notre Dame Fellowship, launched in 2024 to commemorate thirty  years of South African democracy, offers a fully‑funded one‑year LLM for South African and African lawyers specialising in constitutional and human‑rights law, as nominated by the Constitutional Court Trust.