Legal mission
Legal mission
The global paperweight on his office desk in White Plains is inscribed with place names that chart lawyer Charles Goldberger’s recent annual travels abroad. They read more like a Cold War spy’s postings than an American tourist’s typical European itinerary: Tallinn, Estonia; Bucharest, Romania; Belgrade, Serbia; Szczecin, Poland.
This fall, Goldberger can add Vladivostok, Russia, to that list.
A 70-year-old attorney and former senior partner at McCullough, Goldberger & Staudt L.L.P., Goldberger has taken his 45 years of experience as a trial attorney in real estate, construction and general commercial cases to universities in post-Communist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He takes along too a DVD case packed with Hollywood-style film studies in the U.S. legal system. They’re a big hit with the foreign law students he teaches, some of whom already know Paul Newman’s acting, if not his riveting closing argument to the jury in “The Verdict.”
The lawyer is accompanied abroad by his wife, Micaela. A marathoner who has aged into half-marathons, he also brings his running shoes and seeks the sporting, sociable company of running clubs in the cities he visits. Rotary clubs too are regular stops and meeting places in Eastern Europe for Goldberger, a 35-year member of the Rotary Club of White Plains.
In 2006, Goldberger responded to “a blind email” from the American Bar Association about a newly launched teaching program abroad for American lawyers. The Center for International Legal Studies, based in Salzburg, Austria, was seeking senior lawyers with at least 20 years of practice in English and American common-law systems to teach without pay at law schools in Eastern Europe and in the former republics of the Soviet Union.
Goldberger was at a point in his career where he no longer tried as many cases. “And I don’t play golf,” he said, “and I can’t stand sitting on the beach and I don’t like fishing.” He and his wife do love to travel, however, and so he jumped at the chance to be among 50 lawyers chosen to teach in the first year of the cooperative program.
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