Jack Goldsmith

Jack Landsmith Goldsmith is Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, who had previously served, in the George W. Bush Administration, as a legal adviser to, and then Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. Previously, he had been active, academically, conservative view of foreign affairs, in which he decried what he called the "judicialization of international politics".

In 2002 Goldsmith joined the Bush administration working first in the General Counsel's office at the Pentagon and then serving as assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel.

Prior to Bush Administration
He received his first undergraduate degree from Washington & Lee University, Summa Cum Laude 1984, and a second B.A. from Oxford University in 1986. His law degree is from Yale (1989), after which he took a M.A. (Hons.) at Oxford, and then obtained a Diploma in Private International Law from the Hague Academy of International Law in 1992.

Goldsmith clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court, and for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

He was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School, and as associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. From 1991 to 1992, he served as legal assistant to Judge George Aldrich, of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Netherlands.

In 1997, he wrote several papers on the relationships among international law, politics, and U.S. policy. One questioned the "modern position" that customary international law has the status of U.S. federal statutes. He and Curtis Bradley elaborated that the U.S. courts should not allow international humanitarian law, in particular, to supercede the decisions of the Legislative and Executive Branches of the U.S. government.

Department of Defense
Prior to coming to the Justice Department, he had been a legal adviser to the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense, William J. "Jim" Haynes II. He sent a memo to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, suggesting that the International Criminal Court might indict American officials for their actions in the war on terror. Goldsmith described this threat as “the judicialization of international politics.”

Office of Legal Counsel
He resigned nine months later, and, according to the New York Times, "had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies" endorsed by OLC attorneys including John Yoo. "Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the “torture memos,” to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists." He believed he brought the Administration more into conformance with law, but "'I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted'"

After OLC
After leaving DOJ, he became a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), working worked on international law, sovereignty, and intelligence reform.