U.S. District Judge Weinstein, a long-serving federal judge known for crafting large, complex settlements, seeking to correct the injustices of the world and treating every defendant before him with kindness, died Tuesday. He was 99 years old (article available here).
Judge Weinstein spent more than five decades on the federal bench. He eschewed the trappings of the judiciary, wearing suits instead of robes, shaking the hands of defendants who came before him and holding some trials around his conference table.
He kept his old suits in a closet in his chambers, offering them to defendants who arrived in jail clothing. When he once ran out of clothes, he asked a deputy U.S. Marshal to take off his pants and give them to a defendant, said John Gleeson, a former federal judge in Brooklyn.
Jack Bertrand Weinstein was born on Aug. 10, 1921, in Wichita, Kan., and spent much of his childhood in New York’s Brooklyn. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1943, he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, as an officer on a submarine. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1948. Several years later, he worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund under civil-rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall for the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. He was also on the faculty at Columbia and was future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's evidence professor.
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Judge Weinstein to the federal bench. He served as chief judge of the Eastern District of New York from 1980 to 1988. “Every morning, when I get up, I can hardly wait to get into the courthouse,” Judge Weinstein said in a 2014 interview. Judge Weinstein retired in February 2020, at the age of 98. He was one of the most prominent critics of the federal sentencing guidelines.
In a statement Tuesday evening, EDNY Chief Judge Margo K. Brodie described Judge Weinstein as a "national treasure."
May he Rest in Peace.