Acting Judge, Gauteng Division of the High Court; Professor, University of Cape Town

Waheeda Amien is a professor of legal pluralism, religious family law, and human rights in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town. She is primarily involved in research on legal pluralism as it relates to minority religious family laws. Professor Amien is a member of the South African Law Reform Commission’s advisory committee on matrimonial property law. She is also a member of the executive body of the International Commission on Legal Pluralism, of the steering committee of the International Network of Scholars Researching Unofficial Marriages, and the advisory board of the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape. She serves on the editorial boards of several leading international journals, including Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis. She recently served as an acting judge of the North Gauteng Division of the High Court in South Africa, and her work on the recognition and regulation of Muslim marriages in South Africa was used extensively in the seminal case of Women’s Legal Centre Trust v. President of the Republic of South Africa in 2022. Professor Amien teaches and supervises master’s and doctoral students and publishes prolifically in her areas of specialization. She has provided expert opinions to a range of local and international entities, including the United Nations Expert on Minority Issues, the South African Presidency, and the South African Commission on Gender Equality.