Anthony Egan
A LIFE AT LAW: THE MEMOIRS OF IA MAISELS QC by Isie Maisels (Jonathan Ball)
Israel Aaron Maisels, Isie to his friends, was one of the greatest defence advocates in the legal history of South Africa. Born in Johannesburg, he attended a government school, Marist Brothers’ School (forerunner to the present Sacred Heart), and the University of the Witwatersrand, where he embarked on the study of law. Having passed his Bar exam – which allowed him to practice as an advocate of the supreme court – he defended an array of cases as a junior advocate under some distinguished senior advocates.
World War II found him volunteering for military service in air intelligence, though his main work as a lawyer during the period involved court-martial work. After the war he ”took silk”, becoming what was then called a Queen’s Counsel, or QC. The key case of his career as QC was the giant treason trial of 1956-1961, in which the state charged 156 members of the Congress alliance with conspiring to violently overthrow the state.
The trial assembled perhaps the most distinguished team of defence lawyers of the day. It lasted almost five years, the state gradually dropping charges against all but 30 defendants. Thousands of documents were produced as evidence. A prominent academic was brought in to prove the communist intent of the accused. (Another was imported from Switzerland, but was never asked to take the stand.) The process was long, at times incredibly boring. By the time it ended, Maisels and his team (including Bram Fischer, Joe Slovo and Sidney Kentridge) had so thoroughly discredited the prosecution’s case that not a single person was convicted.
Such prominence in a political trial meant that Maisels’s chance of becoming a judge in South Africa was zero. But he was summoned to the Bench of Rhodesia, where he served for a number of years until he found the increasingly repressive legislation under Ian Smith impossible to enforce in good conscience. He returned to South Africa and his practice as QC until his retirement.
Maisels died in 1994, leaving these memoirs unfinished. They were completed and edited for publication by his son, Keith Maisels, and his son-in-law, Benjamin Trisk. The editors are to be complimented for bringing this book into print. Maisels’s life presents an insight into South African legal history that needs to be preserved. Unfortunately, the editors have tended to exercise too little of the proverbial red pen – parts of the memoir are clumsily constructed, contain spelling errors, and perhaps should have been shifted to other sections of the book in the interest of a more fluid narrative.
The result is a highly uneven autobiography, which is a pity given the importance of the subject and Maisels’s many interesting insights into what it meant to be a South African lawyer during the apartheid era.