Bernard W. Nussbaum - Background and Career

Background and Career

Nussbaum, the first child of immigrant parents, was born in New York City and grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan. He was educated in the New York City public schools and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1954. He went to Columbia College in New York as a scholarship student where, in his senior year, he became editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator. He was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1958 he graduated from Columbia and enrolled at Harvard Law School. After his first year he was selected to join the Harvard Law Review and in his final year became Note Editor of the Review. Upon completing law school in 1961, Nussbaum was awarded a Harvard University Sheldon Traveling Fellowship enabling him to travel around the world for a year visiting over 30 countries. On his return he served for six months on active active duty in the United States Army and then was a member of the Army Reserves. In 1962 he was sworn in as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, in the office led by Robert Morgenthau. He was a federal prosecutor for over 3 years and tried a number of major criminal cases.

In 1966 Nussbaum joined the New York law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one year after the firm was founded, He remains a senior partner in the Wachtell, Lipton firm and specializes in corporate and securities litigation. In recent years, he was the lead trial lawyer in a number of major cases won by his firm. These include obtaining a judgment from a Delaware court ordering the consummation of a multi-billion merger between Tyson Foods and IBP,Inc. In 2004 he won a jury verdict, on behalf of the developer of the World Trade Center, against a number of insurance companies declaring that what occurred on September 11 at the Trade Center was two separate events. This significantly increased the amount of insurance due and resulted in a multi-billion payment to the developer for the rebuilding of the Center. Recently, because judicial salaries in New York had been frozen for more than a decade (the legislature refused to raise judicial salaries unless its salaries were also raised), Nussbaum represented the Chief Judge of the State of New York and the Judiciary of the State, without fee, in successful constitutional litigation ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals declared that holding judicial salaries hostage to legislative salaries was unconstitutional. As a consequence, the Legislature and the Governor agreed to change the system for determining the compensation of judges. Decisions regarding judicial salaries are now being made every four years by an independent commission rather than the executive and legislative branches. In August 2011 the first commission appointed raised the salaries of New York state judges (then $136,700 for trial judges) to the level of federal district judges ($174,000), the increase to be phased in over a two and a half year period which began in April 2012.