Richard Stith, since 2017 an emeritus professor, was for forty-one years a teacher at Valparaiso University Law School. He received both his law degree and a doctorate in ethics from Yale University. From Harvard and from the University of California, Berkeley, he holds degrees in political theory.

Professor Stith has served as director of the Program in Biomedical Ethics at St. Louis University School of Medicine. He has also served on the Advisory Council of the National Lawyers Association and on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of Comparative Law. He has been a member of the Academic Council of the doctoral program in law at the Universidad de Los Andes in Chile, the advisory board of the Chilean Revista de Ciencias Sociales, and the editorial council of the Revista de Derechos Humanos in Peru, and other Latin American journals.

Recipient of six Fulbright fellowships, Professor Stith has taught and published on comparative law and legal philosophy in Spain, Germany, India, China, Ukraine, Chile, Paraguay, and Mexico. In 2001, he became the first U.S. professor to be designated by the European Commission as teacher of a “Jean Monnet Module” on the law of the European Union. At his law school, he was honored as the first Swygert Research Fellow in recognition of his scholarship.

Professor Stith was for many years a member of the national board of University Faculty for Life, and still serves on the board of Consistent Life (a group opposed to war and the death penalty as well as to abortion and euthanasia). He has been a speaker at state, national, and international right-to-life gatherings and has presented pro-life testimony by invitation before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution and to state and foreign legislative committees. In 2016, he gave a number of lectures at the invitation of the Supreme Court of Paraguay, lectures that later formed chapters of a book published by the Court. He has written extensively concerning tensions within abortion law in the USA, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Spain, and Germany.