Observing the Letter of the Law

Black nationalist leader Nelson R. Mandela, who has been jailed since 1962, has fulfilled the requirements for South Africa’s highest law degree through a correspondence course that took him six years to complete. Prof. Marinus Weichers of the University of South Africa said Mandela, 70, was told this week he had passed his final examination for admission to the Bar as an advocate. Mandela was an attorney before he was sentenced to life in prison for sabotage in an anti-apartheid campaign. South Africa’s legal and court system differentiates between attorneys and advocates, permitting only advocates to argue in the Supreme Court, on instruction from attorneys. Weichers said Mandela’s courses included private, public and company law as well as South African military law. The graduation ceremony will be sometime next spring in Pretoria, but Weichers could not say whether the government would allow Mandela to attend. Mandela last week was moved to a tightly guarded bungalow on the grounds of the Victor Verster Prison near the Cape Town city of Paarl after being treated at a Cape Town clinic for tuberculosis.

--A late 18th-Century letter from President George Washington to critics of a treaty with Britain sold for $27,450 at Sotheby’s auction house in London. Washington sent the letter in 1795 to a group of officials protesting a treaty John Jay negotiated to settle differences remaining after the Revolutionary War. The treaty came under fire because the British continued violating the Treaty of Paris. “I cannot but hope, that experience will shew, that the public interest required the course which has been pursued,” the first President wrote. Quaritch, a London firm of book dealers, bought the letter. It also paid $4,220 for autographed memorabilia of President William H. Taft about American Jews traveling in Russia in 1911. In 1913, the United States broke its treaty with Russia over the terms under which American Jews could visit that country. The Russian government had said they could visit only on business. Sotheby’s catalogue said the Taft and Washington letters “give a fascinating insight into the thought processes involved in White House decision-making.”

--Speaking of things presidential, Ivan Boesky’s wife, Seema, has been denied her request to cap their 17-room Georgian home in North Castle, N.Y., with a dome similar to one that tops Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home in Charlottesville, Va. The North Castle Zoning Board of Appeals voted 3 to 2 to deny the plans, which were opposed by 11 neighbors. Ivan Boesky paid a record $100-million fine in 1986 to settle federal Securities and Exchange Commission charges of insider stock trading and is serving a three-year term after pleading guilty in April, 1987, to a federal conspiracy charge.