Johannesburg - Michelle le Roux, the legal counsel of Public Enterprises Minister, Pravin Gordhan found herself at the centre of a trending issue on social media this week after Advocate Dali Mpofu, representing former Sars commissioner, Tom Moyane told her to “shut up”.
While Le Roux has choses to remain silent on the outburst, scores of people have lambasted Mpofu for his unbecoming behaviour and have come to the defence of Le Roux who was referred to as a junior counsel by Mpofu.
This in turn had led to people asking, who exactly is Michelle Le Roux?
– Le Roux is a member of the Johannesburg Bar and practises in the areas of general commercial and regulatory law, competition law and administrative law. She has experience in class action litigations and other complex litigations.
– She is an adjunct professor at the Law School of UCT where she lectures in competition law. She also serves as the chairperson of the Ministerial Advisory Panel regarding amendments to the Competition Act.
– She is the co-author of Precedent and Possibility: the (ab)use of law in South Africa and several published articles and opinion pieces. Advocate le Roux is currently working on a second book on Lawfare.
– She is also a member of the New York Bar. In 1999, while working toward her Master’s at the New York University School of Law, she worked for a law firm in New York City. She went on to work at a number of other firms, successfully arguing cases in the US Circuit Court, the US District Court and the New York Supreme Court.
– While in the US, she won a multimillion-dollar verdict against a major retailer who was found to discriminate against people with disabilities. She has also undertaken extensive work to stamp out gender discrimination in some of the largest Wall Street institutions
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