Richard Falk is an American jurist, author, and Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University. Born into a Jewish family in New York, he taught at Princeton for forty years (1961–2001), using international law as a lens to analyze state sovereignty, war crimes, and global power structures.
Falk served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2008 to 2014. He has authored and edited dozens of books on international law and nuclear policy. Though his challenges to Western foreign policy and international governance have often drawn controversy, he remains a widely cited legal scholar.
Falk has consistently applied international legal frameworks to the Israel-Palestine conflict. In his UN reports and academic writings, he argued that Israeli policies in the occupied territories constituted apartheid and illegal annexation, openly accusing Israeli occupation policies of constituting “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.” Drawing on his Jewish heritage, Falk maintains that state violence contradicts Jewish ethical values, advocating for the strict enforcement of international law and full self-determination for Palestinians.