Jerome Joseph "Jerry" Shestack (February 11, 1923 – August 18, 2011) was a Philadelphia lawyer and human rights advocate active in Democratic Party politics who served as president of the American Bar Association (ABA) from 1997 to 1998. He chaired the International League for Human Rights for twenty years, and was appointed the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1979 to 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. Shestack was regularly listed on the National Law Journal's list of the 100 most influential U.S. lawyers. Early life, education, and military service Shestack was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Jewish parents Isidore Shestack and Olga Shankman Shestack. He grew up poor; his father was a paperhanger. His grandfather, an Orthodox Rabbi, was an early influence, telling him "Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue." When he was ten, the family moved to the Wynnefield neighborhood of Philadelphia. He graduated from Overbrook High School in Philadelphia in 1940, where he enjoyed the school's racial and ethnic diversity and began a long passion for poetry. He received a bachelor's degree in history and economics in 1943 from the University of Pennsylvania, having gone through in 2½ years. Shestack then served in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946. During World War II he was a gunnery officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga. He was wounded during the January 21, 1945, Japanese kamikaze attack upon the ship. His kosher dietary habits kept him from worse injury, as he avoided the pork meal that day and thus was not on the mess deck which suffered the worst of the damage. After the war, he attained his law degree (LLB) in 1949 from Harvard Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Record. While a student at Harvard, he launched a movement to have women admitted to the law school, which soon succeeded. Legal career and human rights activities Shestack clerked in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and taught as an instructor for a year at Northwestern Law School and for another year at Louisiana State University, where he advocated for blacks to be admitted to the university's law school. (One who was as a result of these efforts, Ernest Morial, went on to become the first black Mayor of New Orleans.) He became first deputy city solicitor in Philadelphia in 1951 where he