Mark L. Wolf

Mark Wolf was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Yale University from 1965 to 1968, before entering Harvard Law School and receiving his Juris Doctor in 1971.

Prior to his appointment as Judge in 1985, Wolf served in the United States Department of Justice as Special Assistant to United States Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman and as Special Assistant to United States Attorney General Edward Levi after the Watergate scandal. During his time at the Department of Justice, he received a Certificate of Appreciation from President Gerald Ford for his service in the resettlement of Indochinese refugees. Wolf also worked in private practice in Washington D.C. with Surrey, Karasik & Morse and in Boston with Sullivan & Worcester.

From 1981 to 1985, Judge Wolf was Deputy United States Attorney and Chief of the Public Corruption Unit in the District of Massachusetts.[6] In the first three years, Wolf's unit achieved more than 40 consecutive convictions, which included corrupt officials close to Boston Mayor Kevin White (politician).[7] In 1984, he received the Attorney General's Distinguished Service Award for exceptional success in prosecuting public corruption in Massachusetts.

In 1985, Mark Wolf was appointed to serve as United States District Judge for the District of Massachusetts. When he retired from full-time duty in 2012, the Boston Globe published a summary of the most notable cases of his judicial career.[8]

Wolf and Richard Goldstone formed Integrity Initiatives International with colleagues in 2016.

Wolf speaks to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Russia Service, May 30, 2013.[9]

In 2016, Judge Wolf, Justice Richard Goldstone, and colleagues formed Integrity Initiatives International (III) to combat grand corruption, also known as "kleptocracy." The mission of III is to "strengthen the enforcement of criminal laws in order to punish and deter leaders who are corrupt and regularly violate human rights, and to create opportunities for the democratic process to replace them with leaders dedicated to serving their citizens."[10] In order to achieve this, III advocates for the creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC), a concept which Wolf first proposed at the 2012 St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, the 2014 World Forum on Global Governance, and in articles for the Brookings Institution and The Washington Post in 2014.[11][12] The IACC proposal was further developed in a 2018 paper published in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, titled “The World Needs an International Anti-Corruption Court.”[5]

Wolf, Robert Rotberg, and Richard Goldstone meet with distinguished judges, attorneys, and academics to discuss the International Anti-Corruption Court at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 20, 2019.[13]

In 2016, President Juan Manuel Santos declared Colombia the first country to endorse the IACC. In late 2019, a joint declaration was issued by President Iván Duque Márquez of Colombia and (then) President Martín Vizcarra of Peru calling for further study and action to establish an IACC.[14]

In June 2021, over 100 world leaders, including Nobel laureates, former presidents, high court justices, and prominent business people, from over 40 countries signed a Declaration in support of establishing the IACC.[15] The proposed IACC would enforce existing national anti-corruption laws, or a new international counterpart to them, against kleptocrats and their conspirators. The IACC would be a court of last resort. Operating on the principle of complementarity, it would only prosecute if a member state were unwilling or unable to prosecute a case itself. Prosecution in the IACC would, in many cases, result in the incarceration of convicted kleptocrats and thus create the opportunity for the democratic process to replace them with honest leaders. The IACC would also have the potential to recover, repurpose, and repatriate stolen assets through sentences that include orders of restitution in criminal cases and judgments in civil cases brought by whistleblowers, a small portion of which would be used to fund the Court itself. The IACC would need 20 to 25 representative countries to be effective as long as they include some financial centers through which kleptocrats often launder the proceeds of corruption, and countries in which kleptocrats invest and spend their wealth.

In addition to the IACC, Wolf and III also work to support national anti-corruption efforts, such as the High Anti-Corruption Court in Ukraine, for which Wolf has provided expert recommendations and mentored Ukrainian judges.

Wolf speaking at the Global Hemispheric Anti-Corruption Conference in Cali, Colombia in October 2019.[16]

Boston Latin School, where Wolf chairs the John William Ward (professor) Fellowship.

Judge Wolf was previously a Non-Resident Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught a seminar on Combatting Corruption Internationally. He was also a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics and a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He taught courses on the role of the judge in American democracy at Harvard Law School, Boston College Law School, New England Law Boston School, and the University of California-Irvine Law Schools.

Wolf is also Chair of the John William Ward Public Service Fellowship, Chairman Emeritus of the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, and former Chair of the Judge David S. Nelson Fellowship.[17][18]

• Mark Lawrence Wolf at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.