Richard Falk

Richard Anderson Falk (born November 13, 1930) is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor's Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

Falk began his teaching career at Ohio State University and Harvard in the late 1950s.

Falk obtained a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania in 1952 before completing a Bachelor of Laws degree at Yale Law School.

Falk's engagement with politics began at Ohio State University, where in the 1960s as a member of the faculty of law he was a witness to racism targeted at black students.

His move to Princeton University, where the teaching of law was linked to politics, international relations and other social sciences allowed Falk to integrate his professional expertise in international law with his ethical and political values.

Falk aimed to combine his academic work with political activism in a role he described as a "citizen-pilgrim".

"The essential inquiry of a citizen-pilgrim is to discover how to make desirable, yet unlikely, social movements succeed. The movements against slavery, colonialism, racial discrimination, and patriarchy are some instances. My overriding concern is to foster an abolitionist movement against war and aggression as social institutions, which implies the gradual construction of a new world order that assures basic human needs of all people, that safeguards the environment, that protects the fundamental human rights of all individuals and groups without encroaching upon the precarious resources of cultural diversity, and that works toward the non-violent resolution of intersocietal conflicts."

Falk is a member of the Editorial Boards of The Nation and The Progressive.

He has spoken on college campuses and for organizations.

Falk is a former advisory board member of the World Federalist Institute and the American Movement for World Government, as well as a former fellow at the Transnational Institute.

In 1961, he moved to Princeton University, which served as his academic affiliation for over thirty years.

He obtained his Doctorate in Law (SJD) from Harvard University in 1962.

His early thinking was influenced by readings of Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, and C. Wright Mills, and he developed an overriding concern with projects to abolish war and aggression as social institutions.

He was appointed Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice in 1965, a position he retains as emeritus professor.

In 1985, he became a Guggenheim Fellow.

During 1999–2000, Falk worked on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, an initiative of the Prime Minister of Sweden Göran Persson.

For several years Falk served on the Santa Barbara, California local committee of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

He retired from teaching in 2001.

In 2001, Falk served on a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Inquiry Commission for the Palestinian territories with John Dugard, a South African based in Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Kamal Hussein, former foreign minister of Bangladesh.

Falk stated the two main issues: "One is evaluating whether the conditions of occupation are such as to give the Palestinians some kind of right of resistance. And if they have that right, then what are the limits to that right?"

"The other issue at stake in this current inquiry is to evaluate how Israel as the occupying power is carrying out its responsibility to protect the society that is subject to its control."

After its investigation the commission issued a report, "Question of the violation of human rights in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine."

Since 2002, he has been a research professor at the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.

With regard to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he wrote that it is "inescapable that an objective observer would reach the conclusion that this Iraq War is a war of aggression, and as such, that it amounts to a Crime against Peace of the sort for which surviving German leaders were indicted, prosecuted and punished at the Nuremberg trials conducted shortly after the Second World War."

In 2004, he was listed as the author or coauthor of 20 books and the editor or coeditor of another 20 volumes.

Falk has published extensively with multiple books written about international law and the United Nations.

In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

Falk was born into a New York Jewish family.

Defining himself as "an American Jew", he says that having an outsider status, with a sense of not belonging, may have influenced his later role as a critic of American foreign policy.

His being Jewish signifies above all for Falk, "to be preoccupied with overcoming injustice and thirsting for justice in the world, and that means being respectful toward other peoples regardless of their nationality or religion, and empathetic in the face of human suffering whoever and wherever victimization is encountered."

On March 26, 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

Falk replaced South African international law professor John Dugard, who left his post in June 2008 after seven years.

In December 2012, he was asked to resign from the local committee after UN Watch wrote an open letter to HRW asking it to remove Falk.

Falk said he was asked to resign from HRW because his work for the United Nations was contrary to HRW's policy.

Later that month, in response to a UN Watch press release criticizing Falk, forty representatives of major international human rights organisations worldwide signed a letter to HRW urging it to "clarify that he was not 'expelled' as an enemy of human rights' as UN Watch claimed."

As of 2013, he was director of the Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy project.

Falk is a critic of the Westphalian system of nation states, which he argues must be transcended by a more international institution to control the resort to force by nations, as the world moves towards a global ethos in which states renounce their boundary-obsessed territorialism in exchange for a regime of consensually negotiated aims, in which national leaders must be subject to accountability.

With regard to specific geopolitical situations, he has published books and essays analyzing the ideological aspects of the American Human Rights Debate, the legality of the Vietnam War and other military operations.

Phyllis Bennis, a signer of the letter, wrote that HRW stated in a reply on January 1, 2013, that the UN Watch letter was filled with "inaccuracies and falsehoods" and that Falk was asked to resign from HRW to comply with long-standing HRW policy.

Falk's appointment expired in May 2014.