The Faculty of Law of the University of Pretoria proudly extends hearty congratulations to Prof Johan van der Vyver, I. T. Cohen Professor of International Law and Human Rights and Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Law and Religion and an Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Private Law at UP Law, who has recently been honoured for his sixty years of dedication to teaching and lawyering.
At a function held at his honor at the Emory Faculty of Law in Atlanta on Monday, 2 April 2018, Prof van der Vyver was honoured as a celebrated scholar on human rights law who has been involved in the promotion of human rights in South Africa over many decades. John Witte, Jr., who is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law and McDonald Distinguished Professor and Director for the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory Law, paid homage to this 'quiet giant in the law'. He continued to say that 'Prof Van der Vyver remains as a legal engineer, along with his many students and a growing body of coworkers, of the anti-apartheid and then the constitutional reform movements of South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s.'
Prof Witte Jr. also added that Prof Van der Vyver, '[a]fter moving permanently to Emory, added yet another thick layer to his scholarly work. While retaining his earlier legal specialties, he now took on the new subjects of public international law, international humanitarian law, the laws of military conflict, and international criminal law. He followed his trademark method of learning by doing, as he took each of these topics, and wrote voluminously on each of them and created new courses, seminars, and public lectures. He is bringing this new phase of work into a capstone three-volume work on the international criminal court, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
In his 60th year of teaching, the man still teaches a five-course load, gives five or more public lectures around the world, publishes five major articles, writes five chapters for his next monograph, and flies five times back and forth to South Africa as if he was commuting to Macon.'
UP Law is indeed very proud to of the role Prof van der Vyver is still playing in the Faculty and in the international realm.
Click to read more on Emory Law's website.
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