CASAC hosted the Annual Kader Asmal Lecture on 16 September 2026 in Johannesburg which was delivered by Judge Brian Murry of the Irish Supreme Court.

Judge Brian Murray was appointed to the Supreme Court of Ireland in 2022, having previously served on the Court of Appeal. He is a graduate of the law school at Trinity College, Dublin where he had been taught by Kader Asmal. Whilst practising as an advocate from 1989 he also taught law at Trinity College.

Judge Murray will discuss threats to judicial independence in an increasingly fractious global legal order, marked by the rise of populism and the spread of misinformation on social media.

Excerpt:

I had the privilege of being lectured at the Law School in Trinity College Dublin by Professor Asmal, and the pleasure of being a colleague of his on the faculty there for a short period. That was in the 1980s. Kader, of course, left Dublin in 1990 to return to South Africa, but he came back to the Law School at Trinity in December 1994 where he delivered a public lecture. That lecture provides a very good starting point for this one. It was entitled ‘The Making of a Constitution: The Case of South Africa’.[1]

His paper was, obviously, focused on the then transitional Constitution which had taken effect six months earlier. He described it in memorable terms: ‘a negotiated revolution of unique character’. Central to this was, in his language, ‘the elevation of the Constitution to the status of the supreme law of the land, with the concomitant substantial expansion of judicial power of constitutional review’.

For the full Lecture click here