Jack B. Weinstein
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jack B. Weinstein (born 1921, Kansas) is a United States federal judge in the Eastern District of New York. Judge Weinstein was appointed in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson. From 1980 to 1988, he served as chief judge of the district. In 1993, he took senior status; however, unlike some senior judges, he has maintained a full docket (and more) as a senior judge. Because of his longevity, heavy workload, and substantial scholarship he is one of the most famous federal judges to serve his entire career at the district court level.
[edit] Biography
Judge Weinstein was born in Kansas in 1921, and raised partly in Brooklyn. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1943. He served as an officer in the United States Navy during the Second World War. He was a professor at Columbia Law School from 1952 to 1998, continuing to hold his job as a federal judge.
He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1948. After law school, he worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and was a member of the litigation team for Brown v. Board of Education. His colleagues included future Columbia Law colleagues such as Charles Black and Jack Greenberg.
As a federal judge, he has worked with a number of mass tort cases including cases relating to Agent Orange, asbestos, tobacco, 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.
Judge Weinstein's publications include leading treatises on evidence and New York practice. He has also written a number of law review articles, and several books including Individual Justice in Mass Tort Litigation.
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 and Dean Joan Wexler of Brooklyn Law School.
[edit] Cases
The judge presided over a controversial wiki case in 2006-2007 (EFF article):
- At today's hearing, federal district Judge Jack B. Weinstein refused to change his order blocking publication of material that would "facilitate dissemination" of the Lilly documents. A further hearing on the issue is set for Tuesday, January 16.
- Fred von Lohmann files a preliminary motion to lift, or at least clarify, the injunction against this wiki. The Honorable Judge Weinstein will not consider changing the lanaguage of the order until the hearing scheduled for 16 Jan.
Eli Lilly moved the judge to censor the links to the documents one journalist posted on the free wiki site.
According to a New York Times article published on December 17, 2006,[1] Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the health risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling medication for schizophrenia, according to hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers. These documents and e-mail messages were soon made publicly available as a location hidden Tor service[2], and then made available on the public Internet. Eli Lilly got a temporary restraining order from a US District Court signed on January 4th, 2007 to stop the dissemination or downloading of Eli Lilly documents about Zyprexa, and this allowed them to get a few US-based websites to remove them; on January 8 2007, Judge Jack B. Weinstein refused the Electronic Frontier Foundation's motion to stay his order[3]. The documents can now only be downloaded from public Internet sites outside the US.[4] These health risks include an increased risk for diabetes through Zyprexa's links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood sugar. Zyprexa is Lilly’s top-selling drug, with sales of $4.2 billion last year.
