Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. Judge With an Activist Streak, Is Dead at 99

Two of his mass crime cases, involving the small arms and tobacco industries, were prevented. He had agreed to a lawsuit accusing handgun manufacturers of negligently allowing illicit arms trafficking, and in 1999 a jury found nine manufacturers liable. However, the judgment was overturned in the absence of evidence of a direct connection between the manufacturers and the shootings cited by the plaintiffs.

Judge Weinstein’s ruling in the 2002 Tobacco Trial would have skipped hundreds of trials in courts across the country with a single trial to determine whether cigarette makers should receive punitive damages. In May 2005, the United States Appeals Court for the Second District denied the plan, found deficiencies in the composition of the plaintiff class – all Americans with smoke-related complaints and their survivors – and cited the difficulty of maintaining a single fund without victims to compensate for more precise indications of individual injuries

A suit, not a robe

Judge Weinstein was often referred to as the “Reversible Jack”, but in illicit cases he could make decisions that would be difficult for an appeals court to dismember, and even go so far as to set up de facto agencies to administer his judgments. And because so many of these cases have been settled and not brought to justice, it would never be known how appellate courts would have handled his decisions.

Some critics said its case law drowned individual interests in broader societal goals. Charles T. Kimmett reviewed the judges’ book “Individual Justice in Mass Tort Litigation” (1995) and wrote in the Yale Law Journal that Judge Weinstein’s “communitarian ethics” and his demands for legislative solutions such as insurance mechanisms and help for defined groups of victims would necessarily be exactly that expand institutional powers which he viewed with suspicion.

Still, Judge Weinstein often said that the person had their ultimate responsibility in court, a concern he made evident in criminal proceedings. As a senior judge concerned about unlawful detention and other abuses of defendants’ rights, he took nearly 500 detention exams and read them all aloud. When convicting defendants, he sat at a table with them instead of looking down from a bench. In court he almost always wore a business suit instead of robes.

Judge Weinstein viewed federal condemnation guidelines as betraying the moral need that the sentence should be commensurate with the crime. When he became senior and was able to decline cases, he stopped hearing minor drug cases.

“I am increasingly discouraged at the cruelty and self-destructive nature of our war on drugs,” he wrote in a 1993 Times opinion paper, finding that 60 percent of federal prison inmates were drug offenders.