President
Open Society Institute

Aryeh Neier is president of the Open Society Institute. Prior to joining the Open Society Institute in 1993, he served for 12 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch, of which he was a founder in 1978. Before that, he worked 15 years at the American Civil Liberties Union, including eight years as national executive director. He served as an adjunct professor of law at New York University for more than a dozen years.

Neier is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has published in periodicals such as the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Foreign Policy. For a dozen years he wrote a column on human rights for The Nation. He has contributed more than a 150 op-ed articles in newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the International Herald Tribune. Author of six books, including his most recent, Taking Liberties (2003), Neier has also contributed chapters to more than 20 books.

He has lectured at many of the country’s leading universities. He is the recipient of six honorary degrees and the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award and the International Bar Association’s Rule of Law Award.

Sam Roberts is an urban affairs correspondent for the New York Times. Roberts has written for the Times for more than two decades. Before joining the Times, he was a reporter and city editor at the Daily News.

His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and New York Magazine, and he is the author and co-author of several books.

Christopher Stone is professor of the practice of criminal justice at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he serves both as faculty director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and as faculty chair of the program in criminal justice policy and management.

From 1994 through 2004, he served as director of the Vera Institute of Justice, having joined Vera to direct its London office in 1986.

Herb Sturz is a senior adviser at the Open Society Institute. He is founding chairman of The After-School Corporation and served as founding director of the Vera Institute of Justice. Sturz has served New York City as deputy mayor for criminal justice and chairman of the New York City Planning Commission. 

He received a BA from the University of Wisconsin and an MA from Columbia University, and is a recipient of a Rockefeller Public Service Award.