FREE STATE BAR NEWS
Full face-lift or a complete revamp? Well, come see for yourself: no longer will visitors to the FS Bar have to

‘sit up straight’, nervously staring at blank walls while waiting for that call into the dark recesses of ‘the advocate’s chambers’. And no longer will members have to desperately try to squeeze into the old tea room for functions and meetings. No, you really won’t recognize our sparkling new reception areas where you can now while away your wait by indulging, from the depth of genuine leather, in the luxury of being, until that call, a true ‘arm-chair critic’ in the face of the modern art works adorning the sleekly colour-coded walls. Not to mention, even, our sunny, spacious glass-and-leather tea-cum-arbitration room with its folding glass divider, and enough space to house every member of this Bar, and then some.
On Thursday 8 September 2011 we inaugurated that room with a farewell function for the second and third most senior judges from our Bar at the Free State High Court: Judges Callie Cillié and George Wright who joined the Bench in 1991.
Judge Cillié as a Matie alumnus, obtained his BA LLB from the University of Stellenbosch in 1968, despite being one of Doc Craven’s blue-eyed rugby boys as well as a member of the Student Council. Armed with a Licensiaat Criminele Recht from the University of Gent in Belgium in 1971, he returned to the Free State as a state advocate from 1971 to 1973. From December 1973 to 1990 he had a thriving practice at the Free State Bar, serving also as a member of the Bar Council. His retirement certainly won’t be idle: he has already launched with great enthusiasm into the full-time running of his well-known Sussex stud-farm outside Bloemfontein and, just to keep really busy, has acquired a game farm at Mier in the pristine dunes of the Kalahari.