Edwin Cameron came from a poor, working-class background in Pretoria — his father was in jail for much of his childhood, and he and his sister were sent to a state orphanage. But he took what he himself admits was shameless advantage of the educational opportunities the apartheid state gave to even the most deprived whites, if they wanted them, studied classics and law (ending up at Keble as a Rhodes Scholar, just to rub in the imperialist advantage!), and became a human rights lawyer based in a public-interest law centre at Wits, representing workers and opponents of apartheid in a string of high-profile cases. In 1994 he was appointed as a high court judge under the Mandela government, and he has since served in the appeal court and the constitutional court. He is one of the very few senior government officials in Africa to be both openly gay and openly HIV-positive.

This book is something between a memoir and a textbook on constitutional law: Cameron takes us through the history of judicial involvement in politics under apartheid, the development of the new constitution, and the important cases that have shaped South African law since 1994. There's a lot about the Defiance Campaign and the various trials of Mandela, the Treason Trial, Rivonia, and the rest, as well as about the less spectacular campaigns that helped to undermine the application of the Pass Laws and other key grass-roots components of apartheid oppression in the eighties. Cameron confirms the frequently-made assertion that the relative independence of the judiciary under apartheid and their insistence on proper procedure on occasion saved people from oppression and injustice, and incidentally gave Mandela, in particular, an impregnable platform from which he could address the world whenever the state chose to prosecute him for something. But he also reminds us that judges were drawn — and not at random — from a white population that supported the National Party. The overwhelming majority of the time, courts, especially at the lower levels, were happy to enforce oppressive laws and turn a blind eye to police malpractice. The judiciary can't be exonerated.

There's also a lot about the detailed working of the new constitution, and the way it gives the courts power to decide whether the government is pursuing policies aimed at giving people the basic social and economic rights the constitution promises them — housing, healthcare, water, education and so on. It's not trivial for judges to venture into these areas without overreaching themselves and getting involved in policy-making, which is obviously something that has to be left to elected representatives. Cameron takes us through a few notable cases, including Soobramoney (about the right of a hospital to withhold an expensive treatment from a patient in accordance with a prioritisation policy) and Grootboom (about the obligation for a local authority to have a policy for providing emergency housing). He also discusses at some length the court action taken by the Treatment Action Campaign to mitigate the effects of President Thabo Mbeki's irresponsible AIDS-denialism, for obvious reasons a matter close to his heart.

Cameron was still a serving senior judge when he wrote this book, which perhaps explains why he is rather vague and allusive in his references to government corruption and to "allegations against the integrity of some judges" (presumably referring to the notorious Judge Hlophe of Western Cape). Whilst recognising the many problems South Africa still faces, he seems to be optimistic about the future: the constitution has survived a turbulent twenty years, and politicians, corrupt as they may be in private, still find it necessary to express respect for the rule of law in public. Which probably puts South Africa on a par with the US, and a step ahead of the UK, which doesn't even have a constitution. ( )