About the author
Francois Lion-Cachet is an advocate at the Johannesburg Society of Advocates, with a practice anchored in constitutional, commercial, public, administrative, media and defamation, environmental, culture, heritage, and general civil matters.
He is also a scholar in legal rhetoric, having completed a PhD at the Centre for Rhetoric Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, as the Dikgang Moseneke Fellow (2022–2024) and Mellon Foundation scholar (2022). His doctoral research examines the aesthetic and visual dimensions of South African constitutional jurisprudence — the symbolism, architecture, art collection and ceremonial life of the Constitutional Court and other courts — as sites where law constructs its own authority and legitimacy.
He was awarded a research LLM in media law cum laude from the North-West University in 2019.
Between 2018 and 2024 he worked at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, serving the Constitutional Court Trust in a curatorial and public engagement role, promoting constitutionalism through the Court’s art collection and related programmes. Before that, in 2017, he worked in a public engagement role for the North-West University, also using art and culture to promote institutional transformation and broad inclusion.
He is the founding editor of a progressive Afrikaans arts and culture journal, Klyntji, that is operated as a Public Benefit Organisation. He has contributed chapters, short monographs and essays to academic and public platforms locally and internationally, including a chapter in a Bloomsbury volume on African cultural and gender identity. He has presented guest lectures and at conferences locally and abroad.
This publication is where those threads meet — law, culture, institutions, and the question of what South Africa’s transformative constitutional project purports to be and is meant to achieve.
Email: francois@lioncachet.com
