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Jack Goldsmith

American legal scholar

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ3157187 ↗
Source-derived summary

Jack Landman Goldsmith III (born September 26, 1962) is an American legal scholar. He serves as the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he has written extensively in the fields of international law, civil procedure, federal courts, conflict of laws, and national security law. Writing in The New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen described him as being "widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament".

In addition to being a professor at Harvard, Goldsmith is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a co-founder of the Lawfare Blog along with Brookings fellow Benjamin Wittes and Texas Law professor Robert M. Chesney.

Early life and career

Goldsmith was born in 1962 in Memphis, Tennessee. His stepfather, Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien, is widely believed to have played a role in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. Goldsmith graduated from Pine Crest School in 1980.

After high school, Goldsmith attended Washington & Lee University, graduating in 1984 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude. He earned a second bachelor's degree with first class honours from the University of Oxford in 1986 (promoted to MA per tradition in 1991).

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jack Goldsmith” as american legal scholar. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1962, 1980, 1984, 1986—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1962-09-26. The account is most persuasive where Jack, Goldsmith and American can be independently traced.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american legal scholar. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3157187. VIAF identifies the subject as 100997972. The Library of Congress control number is n96099254. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1980, 1984 and 1986.

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This entry incorporates text from “Jack Goldsmith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.