*Jerome J. Shestack was Senior Consultant to the Executive Committee of EPAM, having played a formative role in the firm’s establishment, development and success.

I met Jerry twenty years ago. While a student in the US, I was literally starving when one of my American friends reached out to her father who was important in Washington, DC. The father called me up and said: "There are three lawyers in this country who are crazy enough to deal with the Russians. Jerry Shestack is the first name. If he does not help you out, call me back for the second name". I never learned the second name.

I went to Schnader Harrison where Jerry was a partner and gave them a passionate speech why their law firm should go into Russia. Jerry gave me a 600 dollar check as a speaking fee and I walked back to 42nd street because I only had a quarter and their check in my pocket and neither one was good for a bus ride.

In the years to come I was fortunate to have Jerry as my mentor. I am now the chairman of a 500-person law firm with offices in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and London. The firm’s motto on our web site reads "Upholding Justice" and you know who had inspired this vision.

Jerry has touched the lives of many like me with kindness, mentorship and support. But there was much more that Jerry had offered all of us: the confidence to stand up for the right thing.

Jerry was a dreamer. They called him a Renaissance Man. But he did more than dreaming. He fought for his ideals and made sure he got the result. There were always skeptics around. But Jerry's life is vivid evidence that more often than not Good wins over Evil.

Jerry has had an impact on people and events far from Philadelphia. Jerry fought the Evil of communism and stood up for human rights in the Soviet Union. Who would have believed then that the Soviet Communism would be no longer, that Russian people would be free to travel, that Jerry's friend - a human rights law professor would become the Mayor of my hometown and change that town's name from Leningrad to St Petersburg!

Jerry once told me that he never lost a case. I have asked how was that possible? He said: "I settle the cases which I cannot win".

Last week, when Jerry knew he could not win his final case he asked to be moved from hospital to his home to spend the remaining days with family and friends. In the end, Jerry did not lose. He has settled his final case on good terms.

***

Jerome J. Shestack
(1923 – 2011)

Jerome J. Shestack, 88, former President of the American Bar Association and leading human rights activist died Thursday, August 18, 2011 of renal failure. He was at home and surrounded by his family. His long career in the law was marked by passionate commitment to justice.

Shestack, was appalled by the violence that people heap upon each other in the world, sometimes seeing it with his own eyes, and ached to do something about it.

He championed the causes of women, of ethnic minorities, of those with mental disabilities, of political prisoners and of people unable to access legal services. Michael Greco former President of the ABA described Mr. Shestack as an Ambassador for Human Rights throughout the world. Mr. Shestack has been called "the Pied Piper of just causes".

In 2006 Mr. Shestack received the ABA medal, the highest recognition the association confers. It honors individuals who have rendered exceptionally distinguished service to the cause of American jurisprudence.

Mr. Shestack's first civil rights challenge was as a student at Harvard battling for the admission of women to the Harvard Law School. Harvard began admitting women shortly after he graduated. Later, while teaching at Louisiana State University, he led the movement to get the first black student, Ernest Morial, into L.S.U. Law School. Morial later became the Mayor of New Orleans.

After leading a delegation of human-rights leaders to the violence-ridden Balkans in 1993, he said, "It is a bitter, disillusioning and dispiriting experience to see that people can treat each other with such brutality as we approach the 21st century."

"The human-rights movement is like Sisyphus," he said at the time, referring to the figure in Greek mythology condemned to push a rock up a mountain only to have it repeatedly roll back down. But after recording the horrors committed by all sides in the Balkans, he said it was important to have faith that things will improve. "The alternative to having faith is despair," he said. He decried those who remained silent in the face of atrocities. "It is only a short step from silence to complicity," he said on another occasion.

Mr. Shestack was appointed Ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. He is credited with helping to create the first human rights bloc in U.N. history. He focused international attention on the plight of Andre Sakharov in the Soviet Union and Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

Shestack was a past president of the International League for Human Rights. He was a co-founder and chair of the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, chair of the International Bar Association's Standing Committee on Human Rights and a counselor of the American Society of International Law.

In the domestic sphere, Shestack was a founding member and the first executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, convened by President John F. Kennedy in 1964. He also led seminal efforts to involve law firms in activities to provide volunteer lawyer services to the poor.

Shestack was born in Atlantic City on Baltic Avenue. He lived with his parents and grandparents in a boarding house until he was seven and moved to Philadelphia. The grandson of two rabbis, he spoke Hebrew and Yiddish before he spoke English. He attended Overbrook High School and went to University of Pennsylvania, enlisting in the Naval ROTC. Shestack is a decorated World War II veteran, serving as the gunnery officer on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga in the Pacific theater. Though wounded in a kamikaze attack, he always credited his religion with saving his life, since the pork chop lunch that day, caused him to avoid the officers mess that bore the brunt of the attack.

He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and of Harvard Law School, and has taught at the Law Schools of Northwestern, Louisiana State University, the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers. He is a former first deputy city solicitor of Philadelphia, and was in private practice in Philadelphia, first with Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis, LLP. In 1991, he joined Wolf Block Schor and Solis-Cohen where he chaired the firm's litigation practice. He returned to the Schnader firm in 2009. He has argued more than 150 cases in appellate courts around the nation, and is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

Many insiders believe that in 1987, as a member of the ABA committee reviewing judicial appointments, Shestack was responsible for the unqualified rating that kept Robert Bork off of the Supreme Court. Shestack maintained an impish silence on the subject.

Shestack was an ardent Democrat. He worked for Adlai Stevenson and wrote speeches for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Sargent Shriver, and Senator Ed Muskie.

Shestack was passionately involved in many groups among them were the Jewish Publication Society of America, University of Pennsylvania Press and the American Poetry Review. In later years he was a fervent supporter of Cure Autism Now in honor of his grandson Dov.

Shestack reveled in mentoring people, guiding and shaping their careers. There are over fifty lawyers from Moscow to San Francisco who refer to Jerry as their mentor.

He is survived by Marciarose, his wife of sixty years and, a prominent Philadelphia anchor woman and newspaper columnist. They met when he was attending Harvard on the Gl bill and she was a sixteen year old freshman at Emerson College in Boston. They have two children Jonathan Shestack of Los Angeles and Jennifer Doss of Philadelphia and five grandchildren.