Chief Justice Ismail Mahomed died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 68 in the Linksfield Clinic in Johannesburg on Saturday evening.
Mahomed will be buried in Laudium, Pretoria on Sunday.
South Africa's first black Chief Justice and one of the country's finest civil rights lawyers, Judge Mahomed, was born in Pretoria in 1931, the oldest of six children in a devout Muslim family.
He studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand and joined the bar in 1957. He was unable to rent chambers in the building which housed the Johannesburg Bar, because it fell into a white area under the Group Areas Act.
For 12 years he was forced to borrow desk-space from colleagues who were out in court, resorting to the library when there was no room available and making it almost impossible to consult with clients.
Even after obtaining a Group Areas "permit" in 1969 he was barred for another five years from using the common room, by which time he had already become South Africa's first black Senior Counsel.
A workaholic, he became an authority on the Group Areas Act and then became one of the leading experts on administrative and constitutional law.
He was widely recognised as one of the most gifted orators at the South African bar. He defended many anti-apartheid activists in political trials. He was legal adviser to Swapo and was the author of Namibia's Constitution which abolished capital punishment and later became that country's Chief Justice.
In 1991, Judge Mahomed became South Africa's first black judge.
He underwent major heart surgery shortly before the announcement of Arthur Chaskalson's appointment to the presidency of the Constitutional Court N a post for which Mahomed was strongly tipped. He later become deputy president of that court.
In October 1996, President Nelson Mandela appointed him South Africa's first black Chief Justice, a position he held until he was taken ill with pancreatic cancer in February 2000.
When he moved to Bloemfontein, Judge Mahomed said he had mixed feelings about returning to a city which when he was senior counsel, saw him fleeing across the across the border before dusk because of a ban on the presence of Indians overnight in the Free State.
"My return to that province revives fresh wounds and painful memories which I cannot and would not want to obliterate," he said then.
On his appointment as Chief Justice, Judge Mahomed called on the entire judiciary to support him in restoring the legitimacy and sovereignty of the law in the eyes of SA's majority.
He hoped to contribute to "the urgent need to salvage the image of the law". The judiciary needed to be a friend and protector of the people, instead of an instrument of racial, gender and political oppression, Judge Mahomed said. - Sapa