A man of exactness of expression - Renowned Law Professor George Wille

Renowned Roman-Dutch law professor, George Wille (1880-1966) taught at the University of Cape Town from the 1920s and for the next quarter of a century: boasting among his many hundreds of students Messieurs Justices Marius Diemont and Michael Corbett, both of whom were ascended to the pinnacle of the South African judiciary to the Appeal Court (later named the Appellate Division) the now Supreme Court of Appeal, with the latter of the two Justices having further been elevated to be the sixteenth Chief Justice of South Africa.  Professor Wille was the founding author of his name's-sake seminal work, the leading textbook on the South African common law, Wille’s Principles of South African Law, first published in 1937 under the title The Principles of South African Law, now published in its ninth edition.   But, Wille was most famed for his eccentricity and his entertaining and unpredictable lectures.

          Born in 1880 in Graaff-Reinet, he read for and obtained his law degree at the University of Cambridge and went on to be admitted to the Inner Temple of the English Bar. On his return to South Africa, Wille was called to the then Transvaal Bar in 1905 where he practiced law until his appointment to teach Roman-Dutch law at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 1920 where he remained Chair of that subject until 1946. Despite his English education, Wille had a sound knowledge of and a great love for Roman-Dutch law and he was an obvious admirer of Sir John Wessels, who had been a judge from 1902 to 1936 and Chief Justice from 1932 to 1936, and that of Mr Justice E F (Billy) Watermeyer, a judge from 1922 to 1950 and Chief Justice from 1943 to 1950; both of whom were champions of the Roman-Dutch law. During his tenure at UCT, Professor Wille obtained his Letters Patent and became a KC (King's Counsel) in 1924 and he is 'a character' of real note who lived up to his reputation of eccentricity that earned him a place in Professor Ellison Kahn's Law, Life & Laughter Encore: Legal Anecdotes & Portraits from Southern Africa, in which work has been fondly said of Professor Wille at 288:

Wille was, without question, an excellent teacher, bringing to that task rare intellectual honesty, dedication to the primacy of good faith, a powerful and logical mind, an interest in definitions and a talent for framing useful ones, and a gift of lucid and arresting exposition. His desired for completeness and clarity - almost a passion - sometimes did him disservice; for he was constitutionally incapable of dissembling, or of shrouding in a fog of ambiguous words, topics which he knew to be difficult. Instead of saying nothing on a difficult subject - as Lee was prone to do - Wille would jump in, always emphatically, but sometimes greatly over-simplifying. He was incapable of using the word "quasi", except as a swear-word. Echoing Sir George Jessel, MR, he used to say: "If I am wrong, I am at least unmistakably wrong." The result was that Lord Atkin's remark "short, simple - and wrong" could be applied to some of Wille's confident utterances, but he was probably more often right than wrong, and that surely is an achievement for even the best of mortals.

         In a tributary biography of Mr Justice Michael Corbett, is written of Professor Wille’s favourite test of intelligence (and perhaps a test of interpretative acumen), that he would say to his students:

‘Write a small letter “i” with a dot on it.’

To which the expected answer was the Greek character known as the diaeresis also known as the trema or umlaut ( ? ): in other words the letter 'i' with an additional dot above it: needless to say, many of his students failed this test. It was undoubtedly one of Professor Wille's attributes to insist on the exactness of expression and the precise use of words to that end. That much is apparent from Kahn's work recounting anecedotes on notable South African legal luminaries of old that -

Sometimes his insistence upon exactness of expression bordered on pedantry. For example, if one were to say "John was killed in a motor-car accident", Wille would respond by asking:

"Why do you say accident? Tell me the facts. You will find that he was killed because of some cause of which you are now ignorant or which has not yet been established. You may find that the person you are speaking  about was killed because of somebody's negligence or because of his own negligent act or omission. In the case of motor-car collisions, its seldom happens that damage or death is due to an act of God or to an accident." 

         As can be imagined, Professor Wille's insistence on the precision and exactness of expression was the sort of thing that should have been 'traumatic' yet 'wholesome' for the young minds which he was sharpening, keeping them on their toes to think before they talked which is not at all an undesirable skill to have in a lawyer.  

          Clearly a man after the science-of-law as opposed to the craft or art-of-law, it is said of Professor Wille that he professed an extreme dislike for poets, whom he associated with Oxford, not Cambridge, and for Oxford legal academics such as Lee and McKerron in particular. Says Mr Justice Corbett that when asked what he meant by poet, Professor Wille would reply that he was 'a person who missed the point for the sake of words', 

(p)oets and poetry were anathema to George Wille. His ultimate disparagement of a person was to call him a poet. He had, for example, a poor opinion of the writing of Massdorp, Lee and McKerron; and they were all labelled poets. One of them - ... Massdorp - was the major poet, while Lee and McKerron were dismissed as minor poets ...

... Wille used to say that poetry and law do not mix, and that lawyers can only learn from poets what to avoid ...

         Having been the only law teacher at the UCT Law Faculty to have seen the inside of a court of law at the time, once, when pressed by his students about his dismal track-record in practice at the Transvaal Bar for over a dozen years he had been there, Justice Diemont writes that Professor Wille responded:

‘My client was either a knave or a fool, or the judge was too stupid to understand my case. Even the judges in the Court of Appeal can write better poetry than law.’

Justice Diemont further recounts that one day he gave a foolish answer to the Professor's question, to which came a hard look from Prof Wille where after he said -

‘My boy, if you go on giving such stupid answers you'll end up in the Appeal Court.’

Little did the eccentric law teacher know that his unflattering prophesy would be realized when Justice Diemont was appointed to the Appellate Division in 1977. Justice Diemont, clearly holding his law Professor and eventual friend in high regard remembered him thus yet in honest terms:

Despite some shortcomings, George Wille was also an entertaining and successful teacher. He had a grasp of basic principle and wrote text books that were lucid and understandable. His first comprehensive book called Landlord and Tenant resolved a multitude of problems and was our standby at the Bar until the Rents Act came to bedevil the law. His next book, Mercantile law of South Africa, caused his students much amusement, not because it was humorous, but because Judge Millin's wife, a well-known author, Sarah Gertrude Millin, stated in her biography that her husband had made the major contribution to the book. This angered Wille. He asked the class to guess who wrote which chapters, saying he would give us one clue as a guideline. "The accurate law is mine, the poetic flourishes are Judge Millin's."

Whether or not he was justified in his aspersions, the book became a best-seller and went into many editions.

         Mr Justice Diemont also relates that in 1924, John Kerr Wyile, a red-haired Scotsman, scholar of international repute - who would sit sucking on a large calabash pipe while philosophising - was appointed to the UCT to teach Roman law and jurisprudence. Due perhaps to this scholar's flaw of character in that he was a clandestine supporter of the Grey Shirts, an anti-Semitic national-socialist body that flourished in the 1930s, the story is told that on first meeting Wyile, Wille took and instant dislike to him and voiced it with complete disregard for the law of defamation. Seemingly going just beyond mere banter between rival colleagues, Wille would say to his students: 

That man is living in the Middle Ages. Ask him about the law of negligence and he will talk to you about chariots, not motor cars.

To which Wyile would reciprocate his scorn openly to his students without subtlety, in the process prompting their students' egging on of both professors with provocative questions. Nevertheless the rivalry between Wille and Wyile was also constructive as observed by Professor Cowen that - 

The opposition between the two men was, on the whole, good for the faculty, it produced a creative tension, not a destructive one, and compelled independent research.

          In his concise history of the UCT, Law Faculty, appositely entitled 'As Durable as the Mountain: The Story of the Cape Town Law School since 1859' (1992) 5 Consultus 32 at 35, UCT Professor Danie Visser, drawing from Robertson's unpublished history of the Law Faculty relates of Wille- 

 Burly and with something of a bucolic appearance ... with the corners of his mouth always ready to twist into his own attractive crooked smile, with laughter not bar behind ... He would have been described, in the common phrase, as no respecter of person, but, in truth, he was a great respecter of persons. What he did not respect was an overt or implied demand for respect for the dignity of office, title or wealth, inherited or self-made, on the part of those who, in his view, did not deserve it as persons. Amongst such, he was often regarded as rough and uncouth and excessively abrasive. But amongst his students he was Uncle George, a big, gruff yet gentle, loveable and wise bear of a man, his growl much worse than his bite, and his colleagues tended to feel as his students did.

Professor Visser also notes that - 

All of [Wille's] books became classics, and even though they had their flaws - he was, for instance, notoriously disrespectful of accurate footnoting - these lucidly written works helped to open up the respective fields with which they were concerned - and let us not underestimate the difficulty of writing on a topic where there are a few or no examples to guide one.

          Professor Kahn writes that in the course of his citation on Professor George Wille, when in 1959 he presented him to the Chancellor for the degree Doctor of Law  honoris causa at UCT, he stated: 

If one were to single out the characteristic which most distinguished him as a lawyer, it would be his exact, indeed meticulous, regard for language and its meaning. Jeremy Bentham has said that 'Laws can only be made with words. Life, liberty, property, honour: everything which is dear to us depends upon the choice of words.' George Wille understands this as well as any man, and has acted upon it to the benefit and inspiration of all who have come into contact with him and his works.

Professor George Wille retired to the quiet town of Hermanus in the Cape, where he lived until he died in his 87th year. Mr Justice Diemont writes that he attended his funeral and was asked to be a pallbearer to represent the many hundreds of students Professor Wille had taught, saluting a remarkable teacher. Students of law, legal practitioners and Judges still benefit immensely from the lucid and understandable classical works of Professor Wille and his contribution to the common law of South Africa lives on. General editor of Principles of South African Law, Professor Fran?ois Du Bois notes in its preface, that some seventy years later in its ninth edition, that that work attests to the durability of Wille's contribution to South African legal development.