Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. Choose With an Activist Streak, Is Useless at 99

Two of his mass tort cases, involving the handgun and tobacco industries, were stymied. He experienced authorised a lawsuit that accused handgun suppliers of negligently enabling unlawful gun visitors, and in 1999 a jury discovered 9 producers liable. But the verdict was overturned for lack of evidence of a immediate connection in between the suppliers and the shootings cited by the plaintiffs.

Choose Weinstein’s choice in the tobacco litigation, in 2002, would have leapfrogged hundreds of lawsuits in courts close to the nation with a one demo to ascertain whether cigarette manufacturers should be assessed punitive damages. In Could 2005, the United States Court docket of Appeals for the Next Circuit rejected the prepare, finding flaws in the composition of the plaintiff course — all Americans suffering from smoking cigarettes-related ailments and their survivors — and citing the trouble of sustaining a solitary fund to compensate victims without having additional precise proof of unique injuries.

A Suit, Not Robes

Choose Weinstein was typically named “Reversible Jack,” but in tort situations he could craft choices that would be challenging for an appeals courtroom to dismember, even going so significantly as to create de facto organizations to administer his rulings. And due to the fact so quite a few of these cases ended up settled relatively than taken to trial, how appeals courts would have resolved his choices would never ever be known.

Some critics mentioned his jurisprudence submerged personal interests in broader social aims. Examining the judge’s e-book “Individual Justice in Mass Tort Litigation” (1995), Charles T. Kimmett wrote in The Yale Law Journal that Decide Weinstein’s “communitarian ethic” and his phone calls for legislative solutions, like insurance policy mechanisms and help for defined groups of victims, would essentially increase the quite institutional powers that he regarded with suspicion.

Even now, Decide Weinstein normally explained that the individual right before the courts was their highest accountability, a problem he manufactured apparent in prison cases. As a senior judge involved about wrongful detentions and other abuses of defendants’ legal rights, he took on virtually 500 backlogged habeas corpus scenarios, and browse them all. When sentencing prison defendants, he sat at a table with them as a substitute of hunting down from a bench. In courtroom, he practically often wore a small business go well with alternatively of robes.

Judge Weinstein viewed federal sentencing pointers as a betrayal of the ethical crucial that the punishment ought to in shape the crime. When he took senior standing and could refuse cases, he stopped listening to small drug scenarios.

“I have turn into increasingly despondent above the cruelties and self-defeating character of our war on prescription drugs,” he wrote in a Instances opinion essay in 1993, noting that 60 percent of federal prison inmates were being drug offenders.