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16 October 2024
Prestige Lecture by Justice Albie Sachs

Invitation

Who actually wrote the Constitution?

The Dean of the Faculty of Law, Prof Serges Kamga, invites you to a Prestige Lecture which will be delivered by Emeritus Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs.

Date: 30 October 2024

Time: 17:30

Venue: Equitas Auditorium

RSVP: Before 20 October 2024 (RSVP here)


Albie Sachs is an activist, writer and former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa (1994 – 2009). He began practising as an advocate at the Cape Bar at the age of 21, defending people charged under the racial statutes and security laws of apartheid. After two spells of being detained in solitary confinement without trial, first for five months, then for three months, he went into exile in England, where he completed a PhD at Sussex University. In 1988, he lost his right arm and his sight in one eye when a bomb was placed in his car by South African security agents in Maputo, Mozambique. After the bombing, he devoted himself to the preparations for a new democratic constitution for South Africa. When he returned home from exile, he served as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the African National Congress until the first democratic elections in 1994.

Sachs is a Board member of the Constitution Hill Trust, which promotes constitutionalism and the rule of law. He has travelled to many countries sharing South African experiences that might help heal divided societies.

He is the author of several books, including The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Justice in South Africa, Sexism and the Law, Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter and The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. His latest books are We, the People: Insights of an activist judge (2016) and Oliver Tambo's Dream (2017). He received an honorary doctorate in Law from the UFS in 2022.

News Archive

Stochastic Modelling for Reliability from Russia
2013-12-20

 

 Prof Maxim (MS) Finkelstein’s
The Russian professor first visited our university in 1993 and loved the environment. For the last 15 years we were fortunate to have had a man of Prof Maxim (MS) Finkelstein’s (65) stature as part of our Department of Mathematical Statistics.

“I like the atmosphere, the environment and the people of the UFS,” says Prof Finkelstein. “The UFS is a real campus, not part of the city as a lot of other universities in South Africa.”

Prof Finkelstein completed his MSc in Mathematical Physics from the Leningrad State University in the USSR in 1971. Maths and Physics have been a passion of his since a young age. In 1979, Prof Finkelstein completed his PhD in Mathematical Theory of Reliability at Leningrad Elektropribor Institute. Before his career at our university, Prof Finkelstein was a Senior Researcher at St. Petersburg Elektropribor Institute and an Associate Professor at Leningrad Technological Institute.

His long list of publications includes over 170 papers and five books. His monograph Failure Rate Modelling for Reliability and Risk was published by Springer in 2008. More recently another monograph – which was co-authored with JH Cha – was published by Springer in April 2013 and is called Stochastic Modelling for Reliability: Shocks, Burn-in, and Heterogeneous Populations.

Prof Finkelstein’s research interests include mathematical theory of reliability, survival analysis, risk and safety modelling, stochastic processes and stochastics in demography. When asked about leisure and life outside of research, the devoted academic’s response was as follows…

“To have publications, you have to work all the time. I work half of Saturdays and most of Sundays,” Prof Finkelstein says. “I spend three months a year in Russia and Germany – mostly during the European summer – for my research.”
“But apart from that, I like reading – classical Russian authors mostly. I swim in the UFS’s swimming pool almost every day and I play tennis as well.”

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