Jack B. Weinstein Receives ALI’s John Minor Wisdom Award
Judge Louis Pollak and award recipient Judge Jack Weinstein
At the ALI Council dinner on October 19 in New York City, the Institute presented its fifth John Minor Wisdom Award. Jack B. Weinstein, Senior Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, was honored for his exemplary, steady, and constructive participation in the Institute. This marks the first time the Wisdom Award has been given to a member of the judiciary.
Judge Weinstein was introduced by ALI Council member Louis H. Pollak, judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, who praised his colleague as "a legal polymath"— a creative jurist, a productive scholar, a pioneering civil-rights advocate, and "one of the few judges whose achievements warrant mention in the same breath as the achievements of Judge Wisdom."
On accepting the award, Judge Weinstein recalled the exasperated third-grade teacher who told his parents, "Nothing good will ever happen to your son unless he lives a very long time and stays out of jail." He then spoke with feeling of the "eight magical words" that still lift spirits, inspire hope for the nation’s future, and have a profound influence at home and abroad: "All men are created equal" and "We the People."
Commending Judge Weinstein for his role in the Institute’s work, ALI Director Lance Liebman said, "Jack Weinstein was a great professor and is a great judge. His contributions to the ALI’s law-reform work have been extra-ordinary. He reads drafts carefully, comes to meetings, identifies issues that others have missed, and offers constructive suggestions. Right now, he is a tremendous help to our work on Aggregate Litigation. Jack gives the ALI his experience, his knowledge, his wisdom, and his sense of humor."
Elected to ALI membership in 1971, Judge Weinstein was an Adviser for the Institute’s Complex Litigation: Statutory Recommendations and Analysis project, and he currently serves as an Adviser for its Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation project. He was an ALI luncheon speaker in 1996, representing the ALI life members’ class of 1971. Judge Weinstein has also contributed to the Institute through service to ALI-ABA: he is the author of an ALI-ABA book entitled Basic Problems of State and Federal Evidence and has served on the faculty for ALI-ABA courses on civil practice and the use of expert testimony.
A native of Wichita, Kansas, Judge Weinstein was appointed in 1967 to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and served as Chief Judge from 1980 to 1988. He took senior status in 1993. He has worked with a number of mass-tort cases including cases relating to Agent Orange, asbestos, tobacco, and handguns. Judge Weinstein taught at Columbia Law School from 1952 to 1998 and has been an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School since 1987. He worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and was a member of the litigation team for Brown v. Board of Education. He has written many books and more than a hundred articles on a variety of topics, including civil procedure, constitutional law, evidence, mass-tort litigation, sentencing, education, Judaism, and ethics. He is the recipient of many honorary awards, including the Judicial Recognition Award of the National Association of Defense Lawyers and the National Law Journal Lawyer of the Year Award. He received his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College and his law degree from Columbia Law School.
The Wisdom Award was established by the Institute’s Executive Committee to honor the late emeritus ALI Council member John Minor Wisdom, former Senior Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who died in 1999. The Award was endowed in 1990 by Judge Wisdom’s law clerks in celebration of his 85th birthday. It is given from time to time in specific recognition of a member’s contributions to the Institute’s work.
Previous recipients were W. Loeber Landau in 1993, M. Bernard Aidinoff in 1995, Donald J. Rapson in 1999, and Michael Marks Cohen in 2004.