New York, NY – Over nearly three decades as a litigator at a downtown law firm, Alvin K. Hellerstein shared a view of the World Trade Center towers with dozens of other colleagues in an office building on Maiden Lane.
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Yet as a United States District Court judge in Manhattan, he has had a singular perspective on the towers — specifically, the suffering that has lingered long after the terrorist attacks that leveled them in 2001.
As the federal judge who has overseen the wrongful death, property damage and personal injury lawsuits arising from 9/11, Judge Hellerstein, 76, has developed a visible empathy for both the families of the victims and for the workers who fell ill after the rescue and cleanup efforts.
“He had my clients in his chambers for over one hour to listen to them,” said Norman Siegel, a lawyer for families seeking to recover human remains from the debris that was carted off to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. “He, more than anyone, understands deeply the pain.”
Yet in eight years of 9/11 oversight, many who have appeared before him say that Judge Hellerstein has also grown determined to put his own stamp on financial settlements reached between a plaintiff and defendant. And recently the city and lawyers have been smarting over his clout.
There is a fine line between enforcing the law as it is written and imposing one’s own values in lieu of what the law requires. The same people who rant about “activist liberal judges” should be just as upset here about this judge substituting his empathy and emotions for a carefully crafted settlement that is fair to all parties. We, the taxpayers, have paid out billions to these so called 9/11 “victims (some real and deserved, more tangential and third-parties and not deserved).
look it up those towers exploded. watch the videos again. you will see the thermite explosions tearing through the steel support columns. they look like white clouds of dust shooting from the sides of the building.
Look it up. there is more than enough proof that those towers were intentionally destroyed,
Class action lawsuits are a major problem. Quite often, the lawyers recieve far too much money, while the actual victims recieve cents on the dollar. Cudus to the Judge for rejecting the proposed settlement. Anyone who says otherwise is displaying a lack of knowledge about how settlements work. Lawyers must propose the terms of the settlement agreement to the Judge for approval. This is because lawyers were taking far too much of the settlement money. Lawyers bring class actions specifically so that they can force large settlements and take massive chunks for themselves. It’s a windfall for the lawyers at the expense of their clients. The clients have no one to represent them because (1) the defendant’s do not care how much the clients get, they want the lawsuit to be over; (2) the plaintiff’s lawyers have every incentive to take the money for themselves; and (3) since the plaintiff’s are a collective group there is no one person who stands up to protest, they are usually uninformed of the proceedings and just get a check in the mail. Both the lodestar and percentage methods of appropriating lawyers fees in class actions are insufficient to solve this class action crisis.