L-R: Fellow Lorre-Ann Fisher, 2018 Scholar-in-Residence Justice Albie Sachs, Darren Walker, and Fellow Naomi Young
Every year, students at CUNY Law have the opportunity to work alongside a different esteemed Scholar-in-Residence. The Sorensen Center invites scholars with different legal backgrounds to lead discussions, participate in events, and guide students develop and refine their legal interests. Scholars have spoken at Critical Voices events, engaged in round table discussions with students on issues of the day, and worked with students on personal projects.
Wolfgang Kaleck
Wolfgang Kaleck founded the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) together with other internationally renowned lawyers in Berlin in 2007. He has served as General Secretary and Legal Director of the organization since its foundation.
Kaleck previously worked as a criminal law attorney at law firm Hummel.Kaleck.Rechtsanwälte, which he co-founded in 1991. Since 1998 he has been an advocate for the Koalition gegen Straflosigkeit (Coalition against Impunity) which fights to hold Argentinian military officials accountable for the murder and disappearance of German citizens during the Argentine dictatorship. Between 2004 and 2008, he worked with the New York Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to pursue criminal proceedings against members of the US military, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Kaleck is a member of the Centre of European Law and Politics at the University of Bremen (ZERP), the Forum for International and Criminal and Humanitarian Law (FICHL), the lawyers collective CCAJAR in Colombia and Mexican non-governmental organization ProDESCas well as a board member of the Paul Grueninger Foundation.
Maina Kiai
Maina Kiai, a prominent Kenyan human rights lawyer, recently began leading a new partnership initiative at Human Rights Watch to build alliances and engage communities in human rights work. Prior to beginning his work with Human Rights Watch, Kiai served as the first-ever United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association from May 2011 to April 2017. As UNSR, he held fact-finding missions in Ferguson, Baltimore, Jackson, and other U.S. cities, and urged lawmakers to stop alarming trend to curb freedom of assembly around Standing Rock, women’s marches, and #blacklivesmatter. He has also focused on workers’ rights and heard challenges faced by workers during his fact-finding missions around the world. When he stepped down as UNSR in 2017, he resumed his work as co-director of InformAction, a community organizing NGO in Kenya.
A lawyer trained at Nairobi and Harvard Universities, Kiai has spent the last twenty years campaigning for human rights and constitutional reform in Kenya – notably as founder and Executive Director of the unofficial Kenya Human Rights Commission, and then as Chairman of Kenya’s National Human Rights Commission (2003-2008), where he won a national reputation for his courageous and effective advocacy against official corruption, in support of political reform, and against impunity following the violence that convulsed Kenya in 2008, causing thousands of deaths.
Albie Sachs
Albie Sachs became an activist at the age of 17. As a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance Campaign and went on to attend the Congress of the People in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955. Three decades later, shortly after the bomb attack that cost him his arm and the sight in one eye, he was called on by the Constitutional Committee of the ANC to co-draft the first outline of a Bill of Rights for a New Democratic South Africa.
Albie Sachs spent decades fighting apartheid as a lawyer and activist. In 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed Albie to the Constitutional Court, South Africa’s highest court. Many of Justice Sachs’s best-known judgments are on discrimination law. He was the main author of the majority judgment in Prinsloo v Van der Linde, which established the connection between the right to equality and dignity. He was the author of the Court’s majority judgment in Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie, in which the Court declared unconstitutional South Africa’s statute defining marriage to be between one man and one woman.
Justice Sachs is the author of Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Sexism and the Law, Oliver’s Tambo’s Dream, and We, the People. He was instrumental in assembling the Constitutional Court Art Collection, representing an historical perspective on a nation’s apartheid history and journey to equality.
George J. Mitchell
Born the fourth of five children to a Lebanese, immigrant textile worker and a janitor who was the orphan son of Irish immigrants, Mitchell rose from modest, small-town origins to become one of the most respected and accomplished leaders in America. His integrity and skills as a problem solver have been sought domestically and internationally at the highest levels.
As the Senate majority leader, Mitchell championed landmark legislation on clean air and water, income tax, and healthcare reform. His success came from honest negotiation, not from playing partisan politics, as he describes in his memoir, The Negotiator. Later, Mitchell was tapped to forge peace treaties and navigate sensitive international conflicts. He worked to achieve the Good Friday Agreement to bring peace to Northern Ireland, appointed by President Clinton, and as U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East under President Obama. Respected for his commitment to fairness, Mitchell chaired commissions on questions facing the Olympic bidding processes and the doping scandal surrounding Major League Baseball.
“Given Senator Mitchell’s impressive career in law and politics – and wonderful wit and frank style – he is an ideal scholar-in-residence,” said Camille Massey, founding executive director of the Sorensen Center for International Peace and Justice. “As a young man, he worked a full-time job, while studying law at night, and will be an inspiration to aspiring social justice lawyers interested in working from local to global.”
Gabrielle Kirk McDonald
Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald was among the first eleven judges elected to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
She was selected by the United Nations with the highest number of votes and later elected President of the Tribunal. She presided over the Tribunal’s first trial in the Tadić case, which resulted in a conviction for crimes against humanity. Judge McDonald also served as a judge on the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal.
Before her international judicial work, Judge McDonald was a United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas, only the third African-American woman to be selected for the federal judiciary. Judge McDonald began her legal career as a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York City and continued as a civil rights attorney with firms in Texas. She taught at several law schools and has written many articles on International Criminal Law.
Raised in New York and New Jersey, Judge McDonald attended Boston University and Hunter College and is a graduate of Howard University School of Law, first in her class.
“We are delighted to welcome globally renowned jurist Judge Gabrielle McDonald, starting in early 2017,” said Camille Massey, founding executive director of the Sorensen Center for International Peace and Justice. “Judge McDonald is a stellar role model for our students and will provide important and highly relevant context to our work on civil rights and international criminal justice.”
Rosemary Barkett
Judge Rosemary Barkett joined the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague in October 2013. Immediately prior to joining The Tribunal, Judge Barkett served for almost two decades as one of twelve active judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She has written landmark opinions in many areas, including immigration, constitutional law, labor rights, sexual harassment, disability rights, privacy rights, and rights of speech and association. She previously served as the first woman Justice in the Florida Supreme Court’s history and was chosen to become Florida’s first woman Chief Justice.
“Judge Barkett is a splendid scholar-in-residence, given her deep commitment to improving justice and her years of experience working on the judiciary from the local to global,” said Camille Massey, founding executive director of the Sorensen Center for International Peace and Justice. “Judge Barkett is a dynamo with a remarkable personal story who clearly loves engaging with aspiring social justice lawyers.”
Judge Barkett’s parents were originally from Syria and moved to Mexico where Judge Barkett was born in Ciudad Victoria. When she was six, her family moved to Miami and she later became a U.S. citizen.
Richard J. Goldstone
Former South African Constitutional Court Justice Richard J. Goldstone, J.D., has joined the newly established Sorensen Center for International Peace and Justice as its inaugural scholar-in-residence for the fall semester of 2014. He will guest lecture, lead seminars, speak at public events, and engage in a series of intimate conversations with students and faculty at CUNY Law.
“Justice Goldstone is the ideal first scholar-in-residence, given his extraordinary contributions to the field of international human rights and CUNY Law School’s deep connections to South Africa and commitment to global justice,” said Camille Massey, founding executive director of the Sorensen Center for International Peace and Justice. “Justice Goldstone’s residency will provide inspiration to aspiring social justice lawyers and help carry forth Ted Sorensen’s legacy. He and Ted knew and much admired each other, so this is an auspicious start to our scholars-in-residence program.”
Goldstone was a judge in South Africa for 23 years, the last nine as a justice of the Constitutional Court. He played a major role in the transition from apartheid South Africa to democracy. From 1994 to 1996 he was the chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, during which time systematic rape was recognized as a war crime.