Jack B. Weinstein - Biography

Biography

Judge Weinstein was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921, and raised partly in Brooklyn. He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. He graduated from Brooklyn College with a B.A. in 1943. He served as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946. He graduated from Columbia Law School with an L.L.B. in 1948.

After law school, he worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was a member of the litigation team for Brown v. Board of Education, and worked on the "one man, one vote" litigation of the 1960s. His colleagues included future Columbia Law colleagues such as Charles Black and Jack Greenberg. He was a law clerk to Hon. Stanley Fuld, New York State Court of Appeals from 1949 to 1950. He was a County attorney of Nassau County, New York from 1955 to 1957.

On January 16, 1967, he was nominated as a federal judge to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, to a seat vacated by Leo R. Rayfiel. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on April 14, 1967, and received commission on April 15, 1967.

As a federal judge, he has worked with a number of mass tort cases including cases relating to Agent Orange, asbestos, tobacco, breast implants, DES, Zyprexa, and handguns. He is often viewed as a particularly creative judge in the area of mass torts (depending on the point of view of the speaker, this may be a compliment or a criticism). Judge Weinstein is also well known for his personal, informal courtroom style (Weinstein conducts most hearings seated at a table in the middle of the courtroom with counsel, rather than from the bench, and often chooses to wear an ordinary business suit with no judicial robe). He tends to avoid harsh criminal sentences. He has been known to take on large numbers of cases from other judges, and on one occasion collected most of the unresolved habeas corpus petitions in the Eastern District to bring finality to the claims of many prisoners.

He was also a professor at Columbia Law School from 1952 to 1998, continuing to hold his job as a federal judge. Since 1987, he has been an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School.

The judge's former law clerks include a number of judges and law professors, including Judge Denise Cote of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Dean Joan Wexler of Brooklyn Law School, Professor Anita Bernstein of Brooklyn Law School, Professor Marty Lederman of Georgetown University Law Center, Professor Elizabeth Nowicki of Tulane Law School, Professor John C.P. Goldberg of Harvard Law School, Professors Samuel Buell and Jonathan B. Wiener of Duke University School of Law, and Professor Michael Perry of Emory University School of Law.