Richard J. Goldstone graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BA. LLB. cum laude in 1962. After practising as an Advocate at the Johannesburg Bar, he was appointed Senior Counsel in 1976, made Judge of the Transvaal Supreme Court in 1980, and appointed Judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court in 1989. From 1991 to 1994, he served as Chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, which came to be known as the Goldstone Commission. From July 1994 to October 2003, he was a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, where he played a major role in the transition from apartheid South Africa to democracy. 

From August 1994 to September 1996, he served as the Chief Prosecutor of the UN International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He has served as an expert in several commissions, high-level groups and task forces, including the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo, the International Task Force on Terrorism, the Investigation into the Iraq Oil for Food Programme and the UN Fact Finding Mission on possible war crimes and international human rights violations committed in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. On 6 December 2019, he was appointed by the ICC Assembly of States Parties to the Independent Expert Review of the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute System. As Chair of the Review, he led a team of eight other experts mandated to make recommendations on reforms to the Court.

Goldstone received the 1994 International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association, the 2005 Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights, and the 2009 MacArthur Award for International Justice, announced by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is the author of “For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator” (2001), and the co-author of “International Judicial Institutions: the Architecture of International Justice at Home and Abroad” (2008).