the position of chairman of the newly formed Appellate court of the Orange Free State, despite the fact that Reitz was not fully qualified (inter alia too young). Reitz refused the offer for this reason, but when another candidate also refused, Brand insisted on the nomination of Reitz, and convinced the Volksraad to appoint him. Judge and official of Orange Free State With his appointment to the judiciary of the Orange Free State, Reitz came into his own. His arrival – now almost thirty years old and just married – in Bloemfontein in August 1874 was the start of a residency of twenty-one years, as well as the start of a glowing career, to be crowned with his election as State President. Before the mid-1870s, the judicial system of the Orange Free State was rather amateurish and haphazard in character, particularly because most of the judges were legally unqualified. Most of the judicial procedures were in the hands of district magistrates, the so-called Landdrosts, whose main task was administrative. Reitz's first task was to ameliorate this situation, which he did with much vigour. Well within his first year of tenure the Volksraad passed an Ordinance, in which both a professional Circuit Court and a Supreme court were called into being. Reitz became the first president of the Supreme court and consequently also the first Chief Justice of the Orange Free State. Right from the beginning Reitz showed himself to be a fighter, opposing the Volksraad on more than one occasion, tackling deeply ingrained political traditions that stood in the way of the modernisation of the judicial system, but also fighting hard to get the salaries and pensions of state officials improved. As a colonial – he was born in the Cape Colony after all – he had to win the confidence of the Boer population to have his ideas accepted. This he did by travelling with the Circuit Court through the country for over ten years, acquiring insight into and empathy for their way of life and their often conservative and always God-fearing beliefs. It helped that Reitz himself was a religious person and that he had started out in life in the Afrikaans speaking countryside of the Cape Colony. Eventually he became the symbol of Afrikanerdom for many Orange Free Staters. Institutionally, Reitz did much for the codification and review of the laws of the Orange Free State. With