Roy Prosterman, President left a rising career with one of the nation’s top law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, in 1965 for a teaching post at the University of Washington School of Law. Led by an interest in doing something about the poverty and under-development he had seen first-hand in Liberia and Puerto Rico while representing clients, he sought to apply the law to building a better world.

As a young professor teaching property law—troubled by poverty and violent conflicts in developing countries—he began to use the law to help reshape the world. In an article titled “How to Have a Revolution Without a Revolution,” he proposed a program of democratic land reform to satisfy the grievances of the rural landless poor in developing countries.

Prosterman’s idea caught the attention of U.S. policy-makers who were seeking a political settlement to the conflict in Vietnam. Soon he found himself in the middle of the Vietnam War, drafting legislation for a “land-to-the-tillers” program—carried out between 1970 and 1973—that provided land ownership to one million tenant farmer families. Since then, Prosterman and his RDI associates have gone on to apply and develop variants of this peaceful approach to land reform in 37 developing countries around the globe.

Professor Prosterman has conducted field research and provided technical assistance in myriad developing countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America. He is a leading world expert on land reform, and has authored numerous publications on land policy, hunger, and agricultural development, including Land Reform and Democratic Development (Johns Hopkins University Press, co-authored with Jeffrey Riedinger), and articles in The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, and Scientific American. He has received many awards and distinctions, including two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Professor Prosterman is a graduate of the University of Chicago (B.A., 1954) and Harvard Law School (J.D., 1958).

Curriculum Vitae

royp@rdiland.org

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