The Rivonia Group takes great pleasure in welcoming Kevin Hopkins to the group.
Before joining the Johannesburg Bar as a fulltime member, approximately 16 years ago, Kevin was an academic at the Oliver Schreiner School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand where he taught aspects of public law. During this time he wrote for a number of law journals and other legal texts, amongst them Juta, LexisNexis and the Verloren van Themaat Institute. His work has been published in the South African Law Journal, SA Public Law, Obiter, Theoria, the Tydskrif vir Hedendaagse Romeins-Hollandse Reg and the African Journal of Human Rights. He has also co-authored chapters in books and loose-leaf publications, such as Constitutional Law of South Africa (Juta). Kevin has also been a contributor to the South African Yearbook of International Law (Verloren van Themaat Institute)and is the co-author of the chapter on Public International Law in CLoSA (2ed). He has in excess of 40 publications.
Kevin is a former Chairman of the General Council of the Bar of South Africa’s Human Rights Committee. He has also served on various committees and sub-committees of the Johannesburg Bar Council.
As a practitioner at the Bar, Kevin specializes in constitutional law and administrative law cases. These involve, for the most part, regulatory matters such as environmental law and mining; medical schemes, pension funds and the financial services industry; energy and electricity; competition law and policy; and government procurement. However, he also has an interest in the intersection between constitutional law and private law and has done several matters that involve the impact of the Bill of Rights on the development of common law rules in delict, contract, and company law.
He also has a public international law practice which includes matters involving the diplomatic protection of foreign investment and state responsibility for injury to aliens; reparation claims for violations of international human rights law including Alien Tort Statute litigation; and states’ obligations under various international treaties including those that govern their economic relations. He is a member of the International Law Association.
Whilst at the Johannesburg Bar, over the past 16 years or so, Kevin has appeared in a number of important cases in both the Supreme Court of Appeal as well as in the Constitutional Court. He has acted as counsel in more than 80 reported cases.
Kevin holds the degrees BA (Rhodes), LLB (Rhodes), and LLM (Wits). He was admitted as an Advocate in 1999 and became a fulltime member of the Johannesburg Bar in 2005. He was recommended for silk in May 2021. 
