The position of chief justice as it stands today was created in 2001 by the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution of South Africa, as an amalgamation of two previous high-ranking judicial positions of chief justice and president of the Constitutional Court.

At the time of South Africa's democratisation in the early 1990s, the position of chief justice was held by University of Cambridge graduate and Second World War veteran Michael Corbett.

[2] However, with the fall of Apartheid imminent, the progressively-minded Corbett was eventually handed the job of chief justice in 1989.

Although appointed by the National Party government, Corbett was generally well liked by those in South Africa's new African National Congress (ANC)-led government, and upon his retirement in 1996 was given a formal state banquet where President Mandela paid tribute to the chief justice's "passion for justice", "sensitivity to racial discrimination", "intellectual rigour" and "clarity of thought".

Ismail Mohammed had been tipped widely for the job of Constitutional Court president but in 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed leading human rights lawyer and director of the Legal Resources Centre Arthur Chaskalson to the position.