Law professor to serve as justice fellow

Herman Goldstein, emeritus law professor at UW–Madison, has been named to a fellowship with the New York-based Open Society Institute, part of the Soros Foundations Network.

Goldstein, a national expert on policing, will serve as a Senior Soros Justice Fellow with The Center on Crime, Communities & Culture. The center seeks to enhance safety in communities by fostering better understanding of and more support for effective responses to crime. Goldstein will spend much of next year researching new directions for change in urban policing.

“I want to push beyond currently popular generic labels of innovative programs, like community policing, in an effort to identify the most essential, specific changes required for the development of a police service that is both effective and supportive of democratic values,” he said. I want to keep fostering the development of bridges between academic research and what police do on the streets.”

Goldstein’s career as a highly regarded academic researcher who has worked intensively with progressive police attracted the attention of the Soros Foundations Network, says Nancy Mahon, director of The Center on Crime, Communities and Culture.

“The fellowship will allow him to further his work,” Mahon said.

Goldstein was a key researcher on the American Bar Foundation’s landmark study of criminal justice administration in the United States in the 1950s. From 1960-64 he served as executive assistant to O.W. Wilson, the widely recognized architect of the professional model of policing, when Wilson undertook reforming the Chicago Police Department as its superintendent.

Since joining the UW–Madison faculty in 1964, Goldstein has gained national and international attention for his more than 40 years of research and writing on police discretion, police function, the political accountability of the police, and the control of police-citizen contacts.

He is best known in recent years for introducing a new concept – problem oriented policing. The concept encourages police to engage in researching the specific behavioral problems they are expected to handle in their respective communities and, based on this analysis, to develop new and more effective responses. It emphasizes prevention over simply reacting to incidents; a broad range of creative responses over exclusive dependence on law enforcement.

Many police agencies in the United States have implemented elements of problem-oriented policing, as have police departments in Australia, England, Norway and Sweden.

Goldstein’s books include Problem-Oriented Policing (1990) and Policing a Free Society (1977). He was named the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law in 1982, and in 1989 he received the annual leadership award of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national organization of police administrators committed to incorporating research and experimentation into modern-day policing.

He is one of eight scholars recently selected as Senior Soros Justice Fellows with The Center on Crime, Communities & Culture. Since 1996, the center has named 43 Soros Justice Fellows and awarded $9.6 million in grants to more than 130 advocacy and service organizations.

The center and the Open Society Institute are part of the network of foundations started by philanthropist George Soros, a native of Budapest, Hungary, and chair of Soros Fund Management.

According to the Soros Foundations Network, Soros’ philanthropic mission “is to transform closed societies into open ones and to protect and expand the values of existing open societies.”