Gerald Friedman died last week, shortly before his 95 birthday. Many readers may not have known of Judge Friedman in that he retired as Judge President of the Western Cape High Court in 1998. However, he deserves to be known widely because he was a fine judge and a truly great Judge President.

As someone privileged to have served under Western Cape Judge President Gerald Friedman's leadership, albeit for too short a time, I can testify to his superb mentorship and thoughtful and extremely efficient judicial leadership. He was a possessor of a clear vision during the 1990s of the imperative of the transformation of the Bench to ensure demographic representivity of a judiciary which would be capable of meeting the profound legal challenges that awaited it in the newly minted democracy.

Graduating from UCT in 1949, Friedman was called to the Bar, where he built a successful practice, particularly in commercial and administrative law. In 1977, he was appointed a judge of the then Cape Province Supreme Court, where he served until 1990, when he was elevated to the Appellate Division.

To the great fortune of the Cape Supreme Court, he returned there in 1992 to become Judge President where the approach he adopted to the leadership of an important institution was in marked contrast to the apartheid apparatchik who had been the previous Judge President for a long time, one George Munnik.

By then, Friedman's judicial quality was luminously illustrated in the pages of the South African Law Reports. Arguably the...