The Academy of Achievement brings students face-to-face with the extraordinary leaders, visionaries and pioneers who have helped shape our world. Albie Sachs began a lifetime of human rights activism as a 17-year-old law student at the University of Cape Town, when he first campaigned against apartheid. As a young attorney, he defended others charged under racist statutes and repressive laws. After two terms of solitary confinement without trial, he spent the next 22 years exiled in the United Kingdom and Mozambique. In 1988, a car bomb planted by South African agents cost him an arm and the sight in one eye. He devoted himself to preparing a new democratic constitution for South Africa. After South Africa's elections of 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed Sachs as a Justice on the Constitutional Court. Justice Sachs wrote the unanimous opinion in the landmark 2005 decision legalizing same-sex marriage in South Africa.