[1] He was raised in a working-class Jewish family – his father was a motor mechanic and his mother was a legal secretary – and attended Herzlia School in Cape Town,[2] where he, later said, he was taught orthodox Zionist "rubbish".
[3] However, as a teenager, he was heavily influenced by an English class on Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, as well as by his experience in Habonim, where his group leader, a young John Comaroff, exposed him to the works of Karl Marx.
[3] His influences included an early experience watching Steve Biko speak at the university campus, as well as the work of Harold Wolpe and Martin Legassick, who at the time were pioneering a revisionist, Marxist analysis of apartheid.
[3] After graduation, Davis worked briefly as a legal advisor in the tax practice at Old Mutual, planning to save money for postgraduate study overseas.
His students in the class's first cohort included Nicholas Haysom, with whom he set up a reading group covering Marx, Nicos Poulantzas, and Evgeny Pashukanis.
[5] He became involved in the Society for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, fostered ties to the burgeoning trade union movement, and joined the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front when it was launched in 1983.
[3] Also in 1990, Davis was approached to become director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), a position which would be vacated upon John Dugard's retirement.
[1][3] During his 21 years in the High Court, Davis presided over several politically sensitive matters, notably including several floor-crossing disputes and the murder trial of Daliwonga Mandela.
In 2003, Judge Robin Marais of the Supreme Court of Appeal wrote a minority judgement in an appeal from Davis's court, Shoprite Checkers v Bumpers Schwarmas, specifically to chastise Davis for repeating witnesses' "lavatorial" language (the expressions "stuff you", "gatvol", and "bullshit") in a judgement which was subsequently published in the law reports.
[1] During that time, he handed down a landmark judgement in Kylie v Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration, an unfair dismissal complaint brought by a sex worker.
Dennis ruled that the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration had jurisdiction to hear the complaint, writing that, "the fact that prostitution is rendered illegal does not — destroy all the constitutional protection which may be enjoyed by someone as an appellant, were they not to be a sex worker".
[30] In 2009, with four vacancies expected to arise on the Constitutional Court bench, Davis – then the only white judge president in the country – was considered a favourite among members of the legal community.
[43][44] Through this and other forums, he was unusually active, among sitting judges, in public and policy debate,[45] though Paul Hoffman observed in the Mail & Guardian that he was "fond of utilising the pregnant rhetorical question as a device to stimulate controversy in which he is then not implicated".
[46] Among other things, during his time as a sitting judge, he argued publicly in favour of a wealth tax,[47] against the willing-buyer, willing-seller approach to land expropriation,[48] and against the 2008–2009 Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
[1][6] He engaged in robust debate with his colleague and former student, Anton Fagan, whom he accused of perpetuating "a conservative culture of law" on the campus and of "a form of positivism completely unhinged from any normative vision".
[3] Between 2003 and 2008, Davis was a member of the Corporate Law Reform Initiative which drafted the Companies Act, 2008,[1][5] and, after the Davis Tax Committee concluded its work, he continued to work intermittently with the National Treasury: he was a member of the panel of experts that headhunted Edward Kieswetter to succeed Moyane as SARS commissioner in 2019,[50] and during the same period, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni commissioned him to conduct an assessment of the tax gap in South Africa.
He remained an active public commentator, among other things pronouncing himself in favour of a once-off "solidarity tax" to fund COVID-19 vaccine procurement,[53] lifestyle audits of wealthy individuals,[54] treating baseless political attacks on the judiciary as contempt of court offences,[2] resolving the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,[55] and empowering SARS to institute criminal prosecution of non-compliant taxpayers.