Be blunt JSC, should white men not apply to be Constitutional Court judges?
If white men are not excluded a priori, you cannot make the objective assessment that David Unterhalter does not even make the top-five list of candidates
It is grossly unacceptable for the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) to be so coy about what the criteria genuinely are for eligibility to be elected as a Constitutional Court judge. More precisely, the JSC must be blunt about any exclusionary threshold requirements so potential candidates do not waste their time throwing names into a hat from which theirs could never be drawn.
The most obvious elephant in the JSC room is the racialised elephant. Does being white or a white male exclude someone a priori? If so, why not tell the likes of judge David Unterhalter and advocate Alan Dodson to not bother applying at all. But once you invite them for an interview, then the operating assumption has got to be that they are in with a chance. At that point, the quality of their interviews provides a final set of observations that should go into the deliberative process afterwards...
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