Kate O'Regan

Catherine "Kate" O'Regan (born 17 September 1957) is a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

O'Regan studied at the University of Cape Town from 1975 to 1980, earning a BA and LLB.

She was taught briefly by Arthur Chaskalson, who had recently founded the Legal Resources Centre, and ran UCT's legal aid project, working with Mahomed Navsa of the University of the Western Cape.

After earning an LLM from the University of Sydney, she returned to South Africa and began her articles of clerkship at Bowman Gilfillan.

She stayed on at Bowman for two years under John Brand, specialising in labour law and land rights and representing COSATU, NUM, NUMSA and the Black Sash.

In 1985, O'Regan went to London to do a PhD at the London School of Economics on interdicts restraining strikes.

On her return to South Africa in 1988, she worked at the Labour Law Unit and then became an associate professor at the University of Cape Town.

She was a founder member of the Law, Race and Gender Research project and the Institute for Development Law at UCT; advised the African National Congress (of which she was a non-active member from 1991) on land claims legislation, working with Geoff Budlender, Aninka Claassens and Derek Hanekom; and served as a trustee of the Legal Resources Centre Trust.

She co-edited No Place to Rest: Forced Removals and the Law in South Africa and contributed to A Charter for Social Justice: A Contribution to the South African Bill of Rights Debate.

In 1994, O'Regan was appointed to the newly formed Constitutional Court of South Africa by Nelson Mandela.

Aged only 37, O'Regan's appointment was surprising even to her.

She and Yvonne Mokgoro were the only female judges on the Court for its first 13 years.

O'Regan's first majority judgment was S v Bhulwana; S v Gwadiso, where the Court for the first time suspended an order of constitutional invalidity.

In 1998, she co-authored Fedsure Life Assurance Ltd v Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council, the Court's founding judgment on the rule of law and legality review.

The first major judgment of which she was the sole author was Premier, Mpumalanga, still the leading authority on the doctrine of legitimate expectations (on which O'Regan also wrote in Ed-U-College, again in the context of the government's withdrawal of school subsidies).

She wrote two judgments—one in 1999 and one in 2007—in the ongoing litigation between the South African National Defence Union and the South African National Defence Force, as well as NUMSA v Bader Bop, a judgment dealing with the subject of her PhD thesis: the right to strike.

O'Regan's judgment in Dawood v Minister of Home Affairs, delivered in 2000, established for the first time that the right to family life is constitutionally protected and that the conferral of broad discretionary powers on government officials can be unconstitutional.

Her 2001 judgment on the relationship between administrative law and labour law, Fredericks v MEC for Education and Training, Eastern Cape, has effectively been overturned —to almost unanimous disapproval by commentators.

In Sidumo v Rustenburg Platinum Mines Ltd, O'Regan wrote separately to emphasise, in agreement with the majority judgment of Navsa AJ, her law-clinic colleague of thirty years earlier, that administrative law applies to labour law disputes.

In the law of delict, O'Regan's contribution has been significant.

In 2002, she wrote Khumalo v Holomisa, one of the Court's first judgments on defamation law and arguably its only judgment applying the Bill of Rights directly to private parties.

In discrimination law, O'Regan co-authored Prinsloo v Van der Linde, which established the connection between the right to equality and dignity, and penned a unanimous judgment in the 2003 follow-up to Satchwell v President of the Republic of South Africa.

Better known are her two dissents.

In Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie, she strongly criticised the majority for referring the regulation of same-sex marriage to Parliament rather than providing immediate relief.

And her dissent in the earlier S v Jordan (co-authored with Sachs J) held that the criminalisation of sex work (and not its solicitation) unfairly discriminates on the basis of gender and is therefore unconstitutional.

But by far her most-cited contribution to administrative law is her 2004 judgment in Bato Star v Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, which sets out South African law's approach to reasonableness review and judicial deference.

In 2004, she delivered the Metrorail judgment, which holds that Metrorail has a duty to ensure the safety of commuters on its trains and is regarded as an "exemplar" by international commentators for its protection of the right to personal security.

And in 2005, most famously, O'Regan gave judgment in K v Minister of Safety and Security, finding the state liable to compensate a plaintiff who was raped by a police officer.

The judgment's radical expansion of the test for vicarious liability, following Bazley v Curry and Lister v Hesley Hall Ltd, was celebrated by women's rights groups but criticised by some academics.

It has been approved and applied by the Court subsequently.

The judgment is also still cited for its approach to the development of the common law and the use of comparative law.

Finally, in Steenkamp NO v Provincial Tender Board, another case on the delictual liability of public authorities, O'Regan co-wrote a dissent (with Langa CJ) that would have held the state liable for pure economic loss caused to the winner of an unlawfully awarded tender.

O'Regan's judgment in ACDP v Electoral Commission, dealing with the African Christian Democratic Party's application to contest the 2006 local government elections, introduced the doctrine of substantial compliance into South African law.

Her judgment in Richter v Minister of Home Affairs, also on political rights, extended the right to vote to South African citizens living abroad.

O'Regan wrote several judgments on labour law, in which she had specialised as an attorney and academic.

O'Regan's fifteen-year term ended in October 2009.

From 2013 to 2014 she was a commissioner of the Khayelitsha Commission and is now the inaugural director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford.

O'Regan was born in Liverpool, England, into a large Catholic family of Irish immigrants.

She moved to Cape Town when she was seven.

Her mother was a dentist from a "very political household"; her father was a doctor who became active in poor Catholic communities and those subjected to forced removals.