Justice Leona Theron was born in Wentworth, a working-class township under apartheid, and grew up in poverty. Despite these challenges, she excelled academically and earned Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws degrees from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In 1989, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and completed a Masters of Law degree at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. In the U.S., she also worked with the International Labour Organisation and a Los Angeles law firm.

After ten years of practice as an advocate, she was appointed in 1999 as the first Black woman judge of the KwaZulu-Natal High Court, and at 32, the youngest judge in South Africa. In 2010, Justice Theron was appointed as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal as its youngest member, and in 2017, she joined the Constitutional Court, South Africa’s highest court. Over her 26 years on the bench, she has been a leader in judicial education, served on multiple boards, presented widely at national and international conferences, and made history as the first woman President of the Administrative Tribunal of the African Development Bank.

Justice Theron was also a founding member of the South African Chapter of the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ). Under her leadership, World Aids Day was celebrated on the steps of the Durban and Pietermaritzburg High Courts—an unprecedented initiative that earned her recognition as an “activist judge.”

Justice Theron is widely recognized for her independent thinking and her jurisprudence on women’s rights, customary marriage, gender-based violence, children’s rights, education, and administrative law. Her landmark judgment in Gumede (2008) secured equal property rights for women in monogamous customary marriages, later upheld by the Constitutional Court. She is well known for her strong stance against leniency in rape sentencing (State v Nkomo), her defense of learners’ rights in pregnancy and education cases, and her insistence on fair procedures in independent schools (AB v Pridwin Preparatory School).

Over the years, Justice Theron has received numerous awards for her contributions to justice in South Africa. Outside the bench, she is an avid hiker and has summited Mount Kilimanjaro.