The event will be a dialogue with Justice Sachs about contemporary human rights challenges in South Sfrica and the role South Africa plays in the region. It will be moderated by David Palumbo- Liu, professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and Tim Stanton, director of the Overses Studies Program at Stanford University will be a discussant.

Sachs will also be offering guest lectures in Professor Helen Stacy’s course, INTNLREL 144: New Global Human Rights, and ANTHRO 125S: International Criminal Courts and the Question of Global Justice with Professor Ron Jennings. Sachs is further available – and eager – to speak with interested students and faculty throughout his visit. Interested parties should contact Jessica Matthews at jess.matthews@stanford.edu. 

Albert Sachs’s career in human rights activism started when he was 17 years old, continuing through college and into his law practice in Cape Town. In defending people charged under the state’s racist statutes, he attracted the displeasure of authorities and was initially subjected to “banning laws” restricting his activities, then arrested, and finally put into solitary confinement. Upon release from prison, he went into voluntary exile but never discontinued his human rights work. In 1988 in Mozambique, Sachs lost his arm and the sight of one eye when a bomb placed under his car by South African security agents exploded, but emerged from the ordeal with renewed idealism for his cause and what he describes as simple joy at being alive.

In 1990, Sachs returned to South Africa, where he worked to draft the constitution for the newly democratic country. In 1994, he was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Constitutional Court, where he served as judge until 2009, writing decisions that changed the face of human rights in South Africa, including a decision against the death penalty in 1995, a decision in favor of same-sex marriage in 2005, and several significant decisions about health care, access to clean water, housing and infrastructure.

He is the author of Soft Vengence of a Freedom Fighter, wich chronicles his response tothe 1988 car bombing, and five other books including The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, which was dramatized for the Royal Shakespeare Company and broadcast by the BBC.

Justice Sachs will deliver the keynote address for Summer Session's Human Rights Intensive in CEMEX Auditorium on Wednesday, June 26 at 7:30 p.m. A courageous anti-apartheid campaigner in South Africa, Justice Sachs's talk is entitled: HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOUTH AFRICA TODAY. 

Albert Sachs’s career in human rights activism started when he was 17 years old, continuing through college and into his law practice in Cape Town. In defending people charged under the state’s racist statutes, he attracted the displeasure of authorities and was initially subjected to “banning laws” restricting his activities, then arrested, and finally put into solitary confinement. Upon release from prison, he went into voluntary exile but never discontinued his human rights work. In 1988 in Mozambique, Sachs lost his arm and the sight of one eye when a bomb placed under his car by South African security agents exploded, but emerged from the ordeal with renewed idealism for his cause and what he describes as simple joy at being alive.

In 1990, Sachs returned to South Africa, where he worked to draft the constitution for the newly democratic country. In 1994, he was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Constitutional Court, where he served as judge until 2009, writing decisions that changed the face of human rights in South Africa, including a decision against the death penalty in 1995, a decision in favor of same-sex marriage in 2005, and several significant decisions about health care, access to clean water, housing and infrastructure.

He is the author of Soft Vengence of a Freedom Fighter, wich chronicles his response tothe 1988 car bombing, and five other books including The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, which was dramatized for the Royal Shakespeare Company and broadcast by the BBC.

This event is free and open to the public

Barry Weingast will present findings from a paper he co-authored with Douglass C. North from Washington University and Gary W. Cox from Stanford University. "The Violence Trap: A Political-Economic Approach to the Problems of Development" examines the problems of development – with a billion people mired in poverty and governments resistant to economic reform – economists and political scientists have proposed a wide range of development or poverty traps:  self-reinforcing mechanisms that prevent developing countries from embarking on the path of steady development. 

Please see attached paper. 

Speaker Bio:

Barry R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. Weingast is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. He is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass North and John Wallis, 2009, Cambridge University Press); editor (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006); and author (with Douglass North) of "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England" Journal of Economic History (1989). He has won numerous awards, including the William Riker Prize for scholarly achievement in political science; the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics;  the Distinguished Scholar Award in Public Policy, Martin School of Public Policy, University of Kentucky, and the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz: the American Political Science Association’s prize for the best paper at the annual meetings).