The text on the DVD cover of Ruth Cowan's Courting Justice explains that this South African documentary “profiles indomitable female judges charged with the task of advancing [human] rights and enacting transitional justice while confronting the challenges of a male dominated institution.” This both accurately describes the contents and highlights the central tension within this film—it is a story about the heroic project of materializing democracy in South Africa, and the challenges for women judges within a male-dominated institution, but it neither tells viewers enough about either nor adequately explains the connections between the two. Vague notions of “overcoming obstacles” and “transformation” tie the disparate parts together, but unfortunately, they remain vague. Indeed, it seems that in relation to the underrepresentation of women within the judiciary, there is a degree of continuity between the pre- and post-apartheid eras (at the time the film was made, only 18 percent of superior court judges in South Africa were women).

The documentary focuses on black women judges: Yvonne Mokgoro (now retired) and Bess Nkabinde of the South African Constitutional Court, Mandisa Maya of the Supreme Court of Appeal, and Patricia Goliath and Tandazwa Ndita of the Cape High Court. The one white woman featured is Jeannette Traverso, Deputy Judge President of the Cape High Court. The major themes covered (to varying degrees as between individual interviewees) are their backgrounds and what led each of them to the legal profession and the bench, the awesome task of delivering justice and shaping democracy in the new South Africa, juggling the demands of work and family life, the barriers they have faced and overcome, and their perceptions of the importance of having and increasing the numbers of (black) women in the judiciary.

The one point that unites these women is their commitment to their judicial role in realizing the promise of the South African Constitution. The word that dominates their descriptions of their work is responsibility—both the responsibility exercised in taking up their positions and the responsibility of judicial office in the fledgling democracy. By contrast, when it comes to representation on the bench, there is a certain lack of clarity as to whether the issue is simply one of gender, or an intersectional one of gender and race, or more complex still, as evidenced by Justice Maya's explanation of why it is important to have a woman from a rural area on the court. The judges also have different perspectives on whether the current state of (black) women's representation constitutes progress or tragedy. But there the matter is left, as a collection of individual views. Unlike the issue of democracy-building, viewers gain no indication of any broader, shared agenda.

Reference MoranMoran (2009:96–7) notes that in “legal cinema,” the judge is often a marginal character (in contrast to the lawyers as central players), usually spatially confined to the courtroom, and shot at a distance. Courting Justice breaches these visual conventions, although it also serves up many conventional images of judges sitting on the bench, walking along court corridors, and reading in their book-lined chambers. Perhaps the most striking and persistent visual trope is that of robing—this, after all, is what “makes” the judge. Notably, too, apart from one scene in which Justice Maya and a white woman colleague are shown attending to each other's court dress, the robing takes place in the mirror, which says something quite complex about these women's isolation (and that of the judge more generally), their self-regard, and their gendered concern both to look perfectly groomed and to properly “pass” in this alien environment. But it is a robing scene that also gives the film what is, to my mind, its most jarring moment. As Justice Goliath dons her complicated outfit, she says in voice-over that once robed, she is “equal in the full sense of the word”; no longer a wife, a woman, or a mother, she is a judge and “100 percent equal” to her male counterparts. As many viewers will recognize, this is a strikingly limited vision of equality.

Courting Justice will be of interest to scholars, teachers, and students in the areas of gender and judging, women and law, feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, transitional justice, human rights, and comparative constitutional law, its gaps, loose ends, and unexamined verbal and visual statements perhaps providing fruitful starting points for debate.