about Carmel

This blog is the home of Carmel Rickard’s legal columns. These include a weekly feature in the Financial Mail; a weekly column, supported by the International Bar Association, that appears in the electronic legal newspaper, Legalbrief; a monthly slot in the legal magazine Without Prejudice, and the weekly newsletter of the Judicial Institute for Africa (Jifa) of which she is editor-in-chief. The Jifa newsletter is an important resource for judges all over Africa, providing information and analysis of significant new case law in many African jurisdictions.

Carmel has extensive newspaper and radio experience across a wide field, and was for many years the legal editor of the Sunday Times. She has an LLM (cum laude) from the University of Natal, Durban, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, 1992/3. Among the books she has written is Thank You, Judge Mostert! a biography of the life and times of the judge who blew the whistle on the National Party’s InfoGate scandal in the 1970’s. The scandal ultimately led to the resignation of the then-Prime Minister, B J Vorster and it changed the face of politics in South Africa.