Basil Edwards : a scholar, a mentor and a friend : 1932-2014 : obituary

Abstract

With the passing of Professor AB Edwards, South Africa lost a great legal scholar. I lost a mentor and a friend.I first met Professor Edwards (as I continued to call him after his retirement) in 1984 when I was appointed as a research assistant in the then Department of Legal History, Comparative Law and Legal Philosophy. One of my first tasks was to assist in checking references for his work on Paulus Voet, which would later be published as The Selective Paulus Voet (Fundamina Editio Specialis, University of South Africa, 2007). During that time, I translated chapters from his PhD Thesis (University of Cape Town, 1984) from English into Afrikaans - a daunting task for a young research assistant, but giving me my first glimpse of the great scholar that he was. Two years later, I became a permanent member of the Department with Professor Edwards as its Head, and sometime later he became my doctoral supervisor. All in all, I had known him for thirty odd years, yet when I was approached to write this obituary, I realised at once how much and how little I knew about him.