Sir Kenneth James Keith ONZ KBE KC was born in 1937 and educated at Auckland Grammar School, the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington and Harvard Law School. He was a faculty member of Victoria University from 1962 to 1964 and from 1966 to 1991, and served in the New Zealand Department of External Affairs during the early 1960s, and as a member of the United Nations Secretariat from 1968 to 1970.From 1996 to 2003, he was a Judge of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand and a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, and was subsequently one of the inaugural appointments to the new Supreme Court of New Zealand, which replaced the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 2004. He was elected to the International Court of Justice in November 2005, serving a nine-year term from 2006 to 2015.In the 1988 Queen's Birthday Honours, Kenneth Keith was appointed a Knight-Companion of the Order of the British Empire, for services to law reform and legal education, and in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours he was appointed a Member of the Order of New Zealand.