Youth, Education and Early Career
Stephen Yagman was born on December 19, 1944 in Brooklyn, New York into a working-class family. His father, Abraham Yagman, was a dental technician and his mother, Lillyan, was a secretary. He did not learn to read until he was 12 years old and attended Lincoln High School, in Brighton Beach. From 1962-66, Yagman was a lifeguard in Coney Island. After attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, he then graduated from Long Island University in Brooklyn. He received a B.A. in American History, with minors in philosophy and political science. He then received an M.A. in philosophy from New York University, where he studied under former Trotskyite Sidney Hook, who supervised his master’s thesis on the Self-Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Hook encouraged Yagman to drop out of the Ph.D. program and begin law school. Yagman then attended Fordham University's School of Law from which he received a Juris Doctor in 1974.
During graduate school and law school, Yagman taught (English, remedial reading, social studies, economics, and Spanish) in the New York City public school system in Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant from 1967 to 1974. In 1967, Yagman married Marion R. Yagman (from whom he was divorced in 1994) with whom he continues to practice law, along with his other partner, retired United States magistrate judge (1980–96) Joseph Reichmann.
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