Jerome J. Shestack
Jerome J. Shestack is a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council and Chairman of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience. He is also the chairman of the litigation department in the law firm Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen. He was President of the American Bar Association (1997-98) and is a nationally renowned trial lawyer who is cited by the National Law Journal as one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers” in the United States.
A world leader in the international human rights movement, Mr. Shestack chaired the International League for Human Rights for the past twenty years. He served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under President Jimmy Carter and also served as a member of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and as a Commissioner of the United States Presidential-Congressional Commission to Improve Effectiveness of the United Nations under President Bush. Mr. Shestack has chaired the International Bar Association Standing Committee on Human Rights. He founded, and was the first chair of the New York based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, was one of the founders of the Helsinki Watch Committee and served as general counsel of Amnesty International in the U.S. Mr. Shestack serves as Counselor to the American Society of International Law and is currently on the Executive Committee of the International Commission of Jurists and is on the Board of the American Arbitration Society.
Mr. Shestack was a founding member of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. He was also a founder of PILCOP, a Philadelphia public interest law program and was on the Executive Committee of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association.
Mr. Shestack graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and received his L.L.B. from Harvard Law School where he was the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law School Record. He clerked in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and has taught at Northwestern Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, which awarded him an Honorary Fellow of Columbia Law School and has three honorary doctor of laws degrees.
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