Philippa Garson
THE sudden death of professor Etienne Mureinik was a tragic loss to the countr y, friends and colleagues said this week.
Mureinik, dean of the law faculty at Wits University, took his life by jumping from the 23rd floor of a hotel in Braamfontein on Wednesday morning, accordin
g to police, after a recent onset of clinical depression.
A devastated Wits deputy vice-chancellor June Sinclair said Mureinik (42) was “a very dear friend. He was a brilliant academic. It is the most hideous, trag ic loss of a brilliant mind.” Sinclair described Mureinik as a “wonderful teac her because of the preciseness of his mind, his analytical skills and the way he expressed himself”.
Law professor Carole Lewis said Mureinik was “one of the greatest legal minds the country has known. He was a person of extraordinary courage, integrity and principle. Wits has lost one of its cherished assets. His friends have lost s
omebody very dear to them.”
Mureinik, in his capacity as a constitutional law expert, played a significant role in the country’s transition to democracy. He was a member of the Judicia
l Service Commission, and was assisting the Association of Law Societies in it s objections to the constitution currently being heard in the Constitutional C ourt, a few blocks from where he died.
When he discovered the new Constitution had no preamble, he urged the Mail & G uardian to run a competition and he and Cyril Ramaphosa judged the many entrie s. He also helped draft the Bill of Rights and was the Democratic Party’s cons titutional advisor both for the 1993 negotiations and the recent negotiations around the new Constitution.
The Constitutional Court paid tribute to him at its proceedings yesterday, obs erving a minute’s silence. Constitutional Court president Justice Arthur Chask alson said the court was saddened by the death of Mureinik. Constitutional Ass embly senior counsel George Bizos said Mureinik was a constitutional scholar w ith international standing.
Advocate Jack Unterhalter said he knew Mureinik as a “very brilliant lawyer – — oustanding in the field of administrative law. It is a very great loss to t he academic and professional world of law.”
As one of the academics who last year supported moves to unseat then-deputy vi ce-chancellor William Malegapuru Makgoba, he went on to play a leading role in mediating a solution to the stand-off.
He was on the university’s Forum for the Further Acceleration of Change and Tr ansformation and was a crucial player in charting the institution’s future.
Some colleagues were baffled about what drove Mureinik, married to his advocat e wife Amanda for nearly 15 years, to kill himself. But close friends said he had been diagnosed recently as suffering from clinical depression.
Mureinik wrote many influential articles in the press, including the Mail & Gu ardian, and in academic journals.
His brother and sister will be flying from Israel for his funeral, to be held at West Park Cemetary, probably on Sunday.