Justice & Law Quote by Bram Fischer

A courtroom is built to force bodies into obedience: stand here, speak when spoken to, submit to judgment. Bram Fischer’s line detonates that choreography. He’s not pleading, not grandstanding, not performing remorse. He’s issuing a procedural correction with a moral payload: my absence is chosen, it is controlled, and you do not get to narrate it as cowardice or contempt.

The genius is in the double negative. Fischer anticipates the two easiest delegitimizing stories a state tells about dissenters: they’re either disrespectful to “the rule of law” or scared of consequences. He strips both away, leaving the court with an uncomfortable third option: that the court itself is unworthy of participation. The phrase “inform the Court” is pure barrister formality, a last, crisp assertion of professional identity even as he steps outside the institution’s reach. He speaks its language to deny its authority.

Context sharpens the subtext. Fischer, an Afrikaner lawyer defending anti-apartheid activists, went underground rather than submit to an apartheid judiciary he saw as structurally unjust; he was later captured and sentenced. This is not the romance of outlawry. It’s the ethics of refusal: he won’t dignify a rigged forum by appearing in it, and he won’t let the regime recast refusal as panic.

The sentence reads calm because it’s aimed at history, not the bench. It’s a controlled burn: dignity deployed as sabotage.