Intellectuals and democracy : Frank I Michelman's imagination and South Africa's constitutional jurisprudence

Abstract

Every good idea begins somewhere. (Sometimes it begins in many places at the same time - such confluence being the hallmark of cogent currents of contemporary thought.) The symposium that gave rise to this festschrift for Frank Michelman took its cue from a symposium held at Harvard Law School earlier in 2012 to acknowledge his astonishing career. Professor Drucilla Cornell recognised early on that many South African legal scholars and jurists who might have wanted to attend the symposium would be unable to do so. She suggested that we might hold a similar symposium here in South Africa and threw her considerable weight behind the endeavour. Of course, no symposium would have been possible had Professor Michelman himself not been willing to undertake the journey to this home away from home.