Formerly an advocate and Senior Counsel in Johannesburg, he was appointed to the bench in 1991 as a judge of the Transvaal Provincial Division (later the Gauteng High Court).
[1] His family moved to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape in 1954, where his father, Johannes Dante Cloete, was Senior Counsel and later the Judge President of the Eastern Cape Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa.
[1] He clerked for his father at the Supreme Court while reading for his LLB, and he was captain of the smallbore shooting team at St Andrew's, Rhodes, and Oxford.
[1] In November 2002, President Thabo Mbeki announced that Cloete and Carole Lewis would be elevated to the Supreme Court of Appeal with effect from 1 January 2003.
[4][5] Cloete served in the appellate court for just over a decade, during which time he was also an ad hoc judge of appeal in the Seychelles in 2003.