Lex Mpati was born on 5 September 1949 and is a South African retired judge who was the President of the Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa from August 2008 to May 2016.
23 Facts About Lex Mpati
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Lex Mpati was appointed to the bench in February 1997 as a judge of the Eastern Cape Division and he joined the Supreme Court as a puisne judge in December 2000.
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Lex Mpati was an acting judge in the Constitutional Court in 2007.
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Lex Mpati entered legal practice as an attorney in 1985 and was admitted as an advocate in 1989.
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Lex Mpati was born on 5 September 1949 in Durban in the former Natal Province.
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Lex Mpati attended primary school at St Joseph's Catholic School in Fort Beaufort, walking five kilometres to school daily and herding cattle in the morning and evenings.
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Lex Mpati enrolled at Rhodes University in 1979, aged 30, and he completed a BA in law and Xhosa in 1981 and an LLB in 1983.
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Lex Mpati attended Rhodes under a special permit required by black students under apartheid, and he was the second black student to complete an LLB at the university.
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Lex Mpati had begun clerking for a law firm in Grahamstown during his final year of law school, and he stayed with the firm after graduation to complete his articles of clerkship.
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In February 1989, Lex Mpati was admitted to the Grahamstown Bar as an advocate.
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Lex Mpati worked in his own chambers until March 1993, when he took up the post of in-house counsel at the Grahamstown office of the Legal Resources Centre, a prominent human rights law organisation.
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Lex Mpati took silk in April 1996 and shortly afterwards left the Legal Resources Centre to accept appointment as an acting judge in the Supreme Court of South Africa.
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On 1 February 1997, Lex Mpati joined the bench permanently as a judge of the Eastern Cape Division.
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In October 2000, Lex Mpati was among the candidates whom the Judicial Service Commission shortlisted and interviewed for possible appointment to four judicial vacancies on the Supreme Court bench.
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Lex Mpati became the first black judge to sit permanently in the Supreme Court.
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Lex Mpati was considered a likely candidate to assume the presidency upon Howie's retirement, and, indeed, he succeeded Howie on 15 August 2008.
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Lex Mpati was an acting judge in the Constitutional Court of South Africa from 1 June to 30 November 2007.
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Lex Mpati retired from the judiciary in May 2016, and Mandisa Maya succeeded him as Supreme Court President shortly thereafter.
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Lex Mpati led a three-member panel which included Gill Marcus and Emmanuel Lediga and which opened its hearings in January 2019.
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Lex Mpati holds two honorary LLDs, one awarded by Rhodes University in 2004 and the other awarded by Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in 2011.
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Lex Mpati was professor extraordinary at the University of the Free State from 2004 to 2008.
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In 1973 in Grahamstown, Lex Mpati met and married Mireille Nontobeko, who trained as a teacher and later as a nurse.
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Lex Mpati served on committees of the South African Rugby Union and South African Rugby Football Union, as well as on the legal committee of SANZAR.