In a quiet upstairs room in the Iziko South African Museum, we stood under 30,000-year-old cave paintings of the San bushmen—streaks of red ochre and sandy pigment on stone, depicting hunters chasing deer and people huddled near fires. The scenes were simple but intimate, carrying stories of human fear and survival. Coming at the end of our SLS trip, but brought to us from the very beginnings of our human shared story, the paintings offered a way to think about the conflicting trauma and triumph we had witnessed during our time speaking with advocates, attorneys, activists, and government officials in Cape Town. Every profession, from primitive hunting to lawyering, starts as an act of storytelling. We record, we argue, we remember because we’re trying to make meaning out of survival. 

Meeting Albie Sachs, former justice of South Africa’s first Constitutional Court, was proof that the tools of the legal profession could be used to build something new, something freer. When we arrived at his beautiful little white house on the beach, on a plot his family has owned for generations, the space immediately felt alive to me: statues of Black women on the mantle, carved chess pieces of South African wildlife strewn across a table, every corner and every carefully chosen book reflecting the same passion that led him to help curate the Constitutional Court’s art collection. Even at 92, his mind was sharp, his presence grounded; he opened the door to guests mid-sentence without losing his train of thought. 

I remember his story about outlawing torture in the African National Congress’s code of conduct and, specifically, the way he spoke of the unnamed ANC soldier who stood up during the debate to explain why torture would endanger not only their cause but their humanity. It was a reminder that small acts of bravery matter as much as the monumental ones. Judge Sachs had a role in shaping a better history for South Africa—as did the brave man who spoke his mind at that meeting. When Sachs, with a slightly sardonic look, told the group of Stanford Law gunners gathered in his home, “Don’t follow your dreams. Follow the story of your life,” I felt the urge to laugh at his flip of the script, even as chills spread up my spine. Maybe we don’t have to know exactly where we’re headed, or why we’re learning the law, or what we will do with it just yet. Maybe because it’s all a bit absurd—the act of persevering in the face of great suffering—it’s enough to listen for the call and keep walking toward it, one small brave act at a time.

Visiting Khayelitsha was perhaps the most visceral encounter with some form of the “call.” I was hit by a feeling I hadn’t had in years, not since visiting Ramallah in the West Bank as an undergraduate at Yale. In Ramallah, I had stood by a line of open pipes spilling sewage into the street; in Khayelitsha, it was the plastic roofs, sagging and folding in on themselves. Not sure if it was still from the swaying bus or from seeing the contested plots of land, smaller than a Munger studio apartment, but I remember feeling queasy. Both places carried the weight of dispossession, and both reminded me of the same uncomfortable truth: Human suffering is not unique to one country or cause. And yet, what I remember most vividly from both places was not despair, but art. In Ramallah, children had painted their walls with birds breaking through wire fences. In Khayelitsha, container walls were covered in bright graffiti, benches and gates turned into murals, and in front of some shacks, tiny gardens bloomed from plots of mud no larger than a shoeprint. Art as testimony, as life insisting on being acknowledged.

That sense of creativity and courage also found its way into my understanding of lawyering. Meeting with lawyers at South Africa’s Legal Resources Centre offered confirmation that even the most traditional form of impact litigation can demand the imagination of an artist. One lawyer at LRC described her work mapping tribal and customary practices onto South African law as an act of translation: finding words and frameworks within the law to give life to systems of knowledge that predate it. Listening to her speak in a cramped office papered with yellowing news clippings, some celebrating victories, others documenting losses, I saw what creative lawyering looks like in practice. It wasn’t just about crafting clever arguments or citing the right precedent; it was about empathy and vision.

Successful lawyering, it seemed, draws inspiration from everywhere: from art and community practice, as well as from listening deeply to people’s lived realities. South Africa reminded me that justice is, at its core, a practice of joy and imagination. The San artists told stories to make sense of survival; Sachs turned constitutional law into a language of healing; and the murals in Khayelitsha and Ramallah used color to reclaim joy in places the world has written off. Each one was an act of creation in the face of despair.

What I found in Cape Town was not the simple line between the realities of beauty and suffering, but a broader vision of what the work of justice requires: to see the world as it is, and to imagine it otherwise. Art gives form to that imagination, it helps us recognize humanity before the law ever names it, allowing us to make sense of how beauty and suffering are layered one on top of the other. I came to South Africa searching for answers about what it means to study law in a time of inequality and fracture. I left with a narrower and more humble understanding. Meaning comes from creation, not certainty—and justice through the law, like art, demands humility and patience as we carefully, collectively, create it. For me, the opportunity and honor of going to Cape Town with such a talented cohort has helped me understand that effecting justice through the law also requires the faith to keep walking, without a road map, toward the story of your life.

Shreeya Singh, JD ’27, participated in Stanford Law School’s field study Law, Lawyers, and Transformation in Democratic South Africa, part of the S-term held in September before the start of the 2025-26 school year, which is supported by the W.A. Franke Global Law Program. She will intern at Elias Law Group this summer with a focus on defending democracy in the United States. At SLS, she is co-president of the Middle Eastern and South Asian Law Students Association and a notes editor for the Stanford Law Review.