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 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. In the course of his career at the Ford Foundation, Franklin Thomas championed the organisation’s deep‑rooted investment in South Africa’s transition to democracy, backing civil society groups that helped shape a new constitutional order. His commitment to nurturing a robust, independent judiciary led the Ford Foundation to fund programmes that strengthened legal research and advocacy within the country. In recognition of his lasting impact on South Africa’s constitutional development, the Constitutional Court established the Franklin Thomas Fellowship to support young lawyers who embody his vision of justice and societal transformation to study abroad.
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. Langa was a pivotal architect of transformative constitutionalism, using landmark judgments to embed human‑rights protections, equality and democratic participation into the nation’s legal fabric. The Pius Langa Memorial Fellowship at UCL honours his legacy by supporting emerging constitutional lawyers who aspire to continue that work—leveraging the law as a tool for profound social change. By bearing his name, the fellowship signals a commitment to nurturing the next generation of jurists dedicated to advancing the same visionary, rights‑focused jurisprudence that Langa championed.
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. It builds on Notre Dame’s anti‑apartheid legacy, when Rev Theodore Hesburgh asked Justice Richard Goldstone how the university could help South Africa and was answered with the call to “educate our lawyers”, a mission that trained a generation of jurists who now shape the country’s constitutional order.