Former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa

The Institute for Peace & Justice is pleased to announce that Justice Richard J. Goldstone of South Africa will be Eminent Leader in Residence during fall semester 2005.  He will be teaching a course in the MA Program in Peace & Justice Studies and will offer a seminar at the Law School, which is co-sponsoring his residency at USD.  Justice Goldstone serves on the Institute's International Council and was the keynote speaker at the Institute's dedication in December 2001.

Goldstone was born on the 26th October 1938. After graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BA LLB cum laude in 1962 he practiced as an Advocate at the Johannesburg Bar. In 1976 he was appointed Senior Counsel and in 1980 was made Judge of the Transvaal Supreme Court. In 1989 he was appointed Judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. From July 1994 to October 2003 he was a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. In 2004, he was a visiting professor for the spring term at NYU Law School and for the fall term at Fordham Law School. In the winter and spring semesters of 2005, he was the Henry Shattuck Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard law School. For the fall 2005 term, he is a visiting professor at the University of San Diego (USD) in the Master's Program in Peace and Justice Studies and in the School of Law.

From 1991-1994, Justice Goldstone served as Chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, which came to be known as the Goldstone Commission. He was the Chairperson of the Standing Advisory Committee of Company Law from 1984 to 2004. From August 1994 to September 1996 he served as the Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. During 1998 he was the chairperson of a high-level group of international experts, which met in Valencia, Spain, and drafted a Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities for the Director General of UNESCO (the Valencia Declaration). From August 1999 until December 2001 he was the chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo. In December 2001 he was appointed Co-chairperson of the International Bar Association's Task Force on International Terrorism.

In April 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Justice Goldstone as a member of the independent high-level panel charged with investigating the administration and management of the Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq. The Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) is chaired by Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve. The third Committee Member is Mark Pieth of Switzerland, an expert on money-laundering in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). From 1985 to 2000, Justice Goldstone was National President of the National Institute of Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders (NICRO). He is chairperson of the Bradlow Foundation, a charitable educational trust, and from 1994 to 2003 he was the chairperson of the board of the Human Rights Institute of South Africa (HURISA). He remains a trustee of HURISA, and is a director of the American Arbitration Association.

Justice Goldstone serves as Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, is a Governor of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and was president of World ORT (an international technical and technology training organization). He was a member of the International Panel established in August 1997 by the Government of Argentina to monitor the Argentinian Inquiry to elucidate Nazi activities in the Argentine Republic since 1938.

The many awards he has received locally and internationally include the International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association (1994) and Honorary Doctorates of Law from universities in Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He is an Honorary Bencher of the Inner Temple, London, an Honorary Fellow of St Johns College, Cambridge, an Honorary Member of the Association of the Bar of New York, and a Fellow of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University. He is a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 1996, he has been a regular member of the faculty of the Salzburg Seminar.

He is married (wife Noleen) and has two married daughters - Glenda and Nicole. He has four grandsons, Jason, Sean, Ben, and Jordan.