In Pursuit of Right and Justice
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In Pursuit of Right and Justice

Edward Weinfeld as Lawyer and Judge

William E Nelson

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eBook - ePub

In Pursuit of Right and Justice

Edward Weinfeld as Lawyer and Judge

William E Nelson

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In Pursuit of Right and Justice chronicles the life of the United States District Court's Judge Edward Weinfeld, from his humble Lower East Side origins to his distinction as one of the nation's most respected federal judges. Judge Edward Weinfeld's personal growth and socio-economic mobility provides an excellent illustration of how Catholics and Jews descended from turn-of-the-century immigrants were assimilated into the mainstream of New York and American life during the course of the twentieth century. Weinfeld left a rich collection of personal papers that William E. Nelson examines, which depict the compromises and sacrifices Weinfeld had to make to attain professional advancement. Weinfeld's jurisprudence remained closely tied to his own personal values and to the historical contexts in which cases came to his court.

Nelson aptly describes how Weinfeld strove to avoid making new law. He tried to make decisions on preexisting rules or bedrock legal principles; he achieved just results by searching for and finding facts that called those rules into play. Weinfeld's vision of justice was simultaneously a liberal one that enabled him to develop law that reflected societal change, and an apolitical one that did not rest on contested policy judgments.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2004
ISBN
9780814758946
Topic
Law

1

Always a New Yorker

Edward Weinfeld worked and dwelled his entire life within walking distance of the tenement on the Lower East Side in which he was born. Admittedly, Weinfeld enjoyed long walks; nonetheless, the apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street in Manhattan, to which he moved in his late sixties and in which he died only four months short of his eighty-seventh birthday, was only about three miles north of that Lower East Side tenement. And his offices, as a practicing attorney, a state government official, and, later, a federal judge were only about a mile south of his birthplace—on lower Broadway, Centre Street, and Foley Square. Except for commuting trips to Albany as a state official, Weinfeld never lived or worked north of Sixty-sixth Street or west of Broadway; indeed, until he was nearly seventy, he never lived or worked north of East Third Street. New York, or more specifically lower Manhattan, and especially Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was in Weinfeld’s blood.
Weinfeld related to Manhattan differently than do most people who today work or reside on the “glitzy”1 island south of Ninety-sixth Street. Many twenty-first-century New Yorkers were born and educated elsewhere, came to the city for a job that would further their career, and ended up staying. Even those who were born in New York often attended prestigious schools and colleges outside the city and ultimately returned mainly for employment; others who work on Manhattan spend significant interludes residing in its suburbs or summering at its vacation haunts. Manhattan is a magnet whose unrivaled resources exert a forceful, cosmopolitan pull on its workers and residents. Their commitment is to the island’s economic or professional opportunities, to its intellectual or artistic endeavors, to the varied sensual pleasures it offers—to “the un-rivaled opportunities for working, eating, and spending that New Yorkers revel in.”2 One senses most contemporary residents would flee Manhattan if it lost the particular magnetic attraction that binds them to it.
Weinfeld’s ties were different. They were of an Old World sort—they were ties, almost agrarian in nature, to the land of his youth and to its people. Although Weinfeld, of course, was not a farmer, he related to the Manhattan landscape much as his forebears had related to their ancestral landscapes in the Austro-Hungarian empire. He had both the security and the limitation of vision that come from living an entire life in one place. Every street he walked, every corner he turned held memories—memories of youth, of groups to which he had belonged, of people he had helped, of conversations he had held, of successes, and sometimes of failures. His life was completely intertwined with the streets, buildings, and people that surrounded him. He lived and worked in what one recent author has christened “working-class New York,” where people who were “generous; open-minded but skeptical; idealistic but deflating of pretension; bursting with energy and a commitment to doing” sought “to revolutionize society in the name of justice and equality.”3
Weinfeld’s relationship to lower Manhattan was like his father’s relation to the Galacian town of Gorlice, then in the Austrian empire and now in southeastern Poland, where he was born in the early 1860s, or his mother’s relation to the Hungarian farm village of Lelesz, now in eastern Slovakia, where she was born in the mid-1870s.4 Although lower Manhattan was far more densely populated than Gorlice, which had fewer than three thousand Jewish inhabitants, and Lelesz, with a population under two hundred Jews, its geographic dimensions were similar. From his birthplace, Weinfeld could walk two miles south to Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, three miles north to Central Park in mid-Manhattan, four miles northwest to DeWitt Clinton High School, on Tenth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street,5 from which he was graduated in 1918, and a mile northwest to New York University, located at Fourth Street three blocks west of Broadway, where he attended law school from 1918 to 1922. The trial courts that he frequented, both state and federal, were located a mile south of his birthplace, as was the federal court of appeals; the state appellate division had its courthouse a mile to the north. And, when Weinfeld married and moved into his own apartment, it was located merely a half-block away from his birthplace, next door to which his parents still resided.
During his youth and early years of practice, Weinfeld never considered leaving the dependable confines of lower Manhattan. Everything he could possibly need—family, shelter, education, employment, food, entertainment—was within short walking distance. Like his European fore-bears, he would leave his birthplace only for the most special of reasons— to argue his first case in the Court of Appeals at the capital city of Albany and to marry a woman who had grown up (although he had met her in Manhattan) in the neighboring municipality of Brooklyn. What made New York different from Gorlice and Lelesz was that unlike the European towns, it offered a young man a future: merely by working hard within the boundaries of a few square miles of Manhattan, the young Weinfeld could become a great lawyer and ultimately a judge of national repute. No such opportunity had awaited his father, Abraham Weinfeld, within the confines of Gorlice. Accordingly, Abraham first left the town of his birth at the age of thirteen.6
Nothing certain is known about Abraham during the decade or more between his initial departure from Gorlice and his permanent settlement in New York. It is possible that he came to New York as early as 18797and stayed for some undetermined amount of time before returning to Austria. It seems likely that he returned to Gorlice at some point during the 1880s because we know that, when he came to America in 1888, he left a wife and two or three children behind in Gorlice.8 Whatever his wanderings, it seems clear that Abraham was torn during the 1870s and 1880s between his need for the security of a home in Gorlice and a competing need to earn a livelihood. He needed economic opportunity, but he yearned just as much for stability. His son Edward’s relationship to lower Manhattan needs to be understood as the same quest for opportunity conjoined to stability that his father had pursued.
When Abraham Weinfeld left his wife and children in 1888 and came to New York, the immediate cause of his departure was to escape service in the Austrian army; he and two other young men fled Austria together and arrived shortly thereafter in New York.9 Perhaps Abraham intended, as did many immigrants of that era, to have his family join him after he had established his ability to support them.10 Or, his plan from the beginning may have been to desert his wife and leave her abandoned with their children in Europe. This too was a common phenomenon in the late nineteenth century,11 and it is, in fact, what Abraham ultimately did.12
The Lower East Side to which Abraham Weinfeld came in 1888 was victimized by stark poverty and ferocious discrimination. It would remain that way for another half-century, during which his son Edward grew up and attained his early successes. During most of the half-century, the Lower East Side was probably the most densely populated place on earth.13 It also was one of the more squalid. In his classic muckraking work,How the Other Half Lives , Jacob A. Riis described the Lower East Side as a place where “[d]irt and desolation reign[ed]” and “danger lurk[ed]”; where “hundreds of men, women, and children [were] every day slowly starving to death”; and where “the instinct of motherhood even was smothered by poverty and want” as the “poor abandon[ed] their children,” leaving only little notes such as one Riis had read “in a woman’s trembling hand: ‘Take care of Johnny, for God’s sake, I cannot.’”14
Those who controlled New York’s economy and society, and for much of the time its politics, displayed little tolerance toward the poor. Recipients of public assistance, for example, were seen as people “‘without habits of industry or thrift, improvident, usually physically or mentally deficient, who [were] unable through efforts of their own to gain a livelihood.’” It was “‘common knowledge’” that such poor persons were “‘constantly seeking, and generally receive[d] at somewhat regular intervals, public charity or assistance; they ha[d] a practically constant status as ‘poor persons’; they [were] not able to maintain themselves for any long period of time even under ordinary conditions.’”15
Similar contempt was reserved for the working poor. Only a “very few men in every hundred or thousand,” it was said, had sufficient “industry, brains and thrift” to get ahead. Wage workers, according to the same writer, remained employees of others because they had “not initiative enough to be employers themselves”; they remained “poor” because of “lack of brains, lack of wit to earn, thrift to save, and knowledge to use [their] savings.” “No man who ha[d] endeavored to carry out an enterprise,” according to a turn-of-the-century sermon, could avoid being “well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.” Indeed, the “nature of man” was thought to be such that “the superior few and the inferior many scarcely appear[ed] to belong to the same species.”16
This contempt for the poor typically rested on a foundation of religious and ethnic prejudice. The young Edward Weinfeld could not have avoided knowing of virulent anti-Semitism on the part of prominent people such as Henry James, who expressed shock at the “‘Hebrew conquest of New York’” that was transforming the city into a “‘new Jerusalem,’” and Henry Ford, who as late as the 1920s issued repeated warnings against the “‘Jewish menace’” and in 1938 even accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Nazi regime.17 Nor was antiSemitism confined to elites; many Americans in and out of New York City saw Jews as “inflamed radical[s] responsible for Communist revolution in eastern Europe . . . [and] a vast conspiracy designed to enslave America.”18
For Jewish immigrants like Abraham Weinfeld, anti-Semitism was not new; they had known it back home in Europe. They had also endured poverty as bad as, if not worse than, what they would encounter on the Lower East Side. More significant for them was the Lower East Side’s hominess. With a cacophony of Yiddish voices and signs in Yiddish as well as English, the immigrants could feel that they were living and working just as they had in the old country, within a “small compass, meeting only people of their own nationality.” As one immigrant observed, it was as though “we were still in our village” in Europe.19 Thus, it was easy on the Lower East Side to “create community”—a new community in many respects like what the immigrants had left behind in Europe, but in one respect remarkably different. The vital difference was that energies that had been pent up in the old country were “unleashed in this new land of apparent boundlessness.”20
It was in this familiar world of class, ethnic, and religious conflict, antiSemitism, and hatred of the poor—but also a world of opportunity—that Abraham Weinfeld arrived in 1888. He began at the very bottom—as a pants presser. But soon he was rising up. By 1898, he had the ability to support a family, but instead of bringing his wife and children from Austria he married another woman, Fanny Singer, who had migrated to New York from Lelesz, Hungary, in the early 1890s. They had four children— Morris, the eldest, Edward, Bertha, and Isadore.21
Meanwhile, Abraham and Fanny prospered. By the time Edward was born on May 14, 1901, at 233 East Third Street, Abraham was the keeper of a saloon in the building next door, at 231 East Third Street, which in addition to the saloon contained a big kitchen and a room in the back, known as National Hall, which was large enough to accommodate sixty to eighty people. The room contained four or five pool tables serving the saloon, except on Saturday and Sunday nights, when the room was typically emptied and rented out for weddings. As Weinfeld later observed, “[i]t was a good business, and my parents had some money.” As Edward was growing up, the Weinfeld family lived in a spacious apartment immediately above the saloon, which contained four bedrooms, a living room, a music room with a piano, a dining room, and a kitchen.22 The dream that had led Abraham Weinfeld to leave Gorlice and come to New York—the dream of opportunity in conjunction with security—thus had materialized as Abraham and his family had become among the more prosperous immigrants living on the Lower East Side.
It must be emphasized, however, that Abraham Weinfeld’s New York was not the New York of today. Abraham’s New York was not a cosmopolitan world capital from which lives around the globe were controlled. The Lower East Side was a still small community, or group of communities, in which one’s life and standing depended on the immediately surrounding group of people whom one knew. It was not today’s Wall Street and Upper East Side; on the contrary, it was Gorlice transposed and writ large. It was in such a traditional European setting, not in the New York we know, that Edward Weinfeld grew up, walked, and lived much of his life.
Indeed, Edward Weinfeld walked everywhere and knew lower Manhattan in a way in which only people who walk all its streets can ever come to know it. As already noted, he walked to high school and he walked to law school; he walked to work first as a lawyer and later as a judge. He also walked for recreation. On Sundays, Weinfeld walked along an accustomed East Side route from his apartment on East Third Street to Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street and back,23 while on work-days, if time was available, he hiked across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, typically with one of his law clerks; he would walk “as far as the stairwell at the Brooklyn side, whose railing he touched just before turning around, much like a racer in a school yard would touch a distant wall before returning.”24
Indeed, Weinfeld walked around Manhattan whenever he could find an excuse. Frank Tuerkheimer, his clerk during the 1963–64 year, relates the following:
Walking, to the judge, however, was not as one ordinarily construed the term. The analogy to the racer was apt. One . . . afternoon, shortly before 6:00, the Judge said he was leaving and would be walking to a dinner engagement on the Upper East Side. I had a sense he was not averse to company and so I asked if I could join him on the walk. He smiled and said, “Sure.”
The Federal Courthouse is located just north of Chambers Street. The destination in the upper 60’s was perhaps five miles away, a fairly long distance to cover through city traffic in the hour and a quarter the judge had allowed. Keeping pace with the judge, I noticed quickly that this was not a leisurely stroll—by Canal Street it was evident that this was a workout. By 14th Street, it was more of a workout than I had anticipated. Around 23rd Street I began to experience acute pain in the shins, a pain that kept getting worse except during infrequent stops at intersections—stops compelled by red lights. As we continued, it dawned on me that hope for relief from the increasingly painful shins depended on red lights at intersections. In the meantime, I was trying to concentrate on our conversation in which the judge was talking about some factual nuance in an admiralty case he was in the midst of. This was not easy, pain aside, since it was hard to hear what he said because of the street noise and the fact that he was invariably a foot or two in front of me.
As we approached 34th Street, the light facing us was red. Thirty-fourth Street is a major cross street and the possibility of a 30 to 60 second period of relief suddenly seemed like an awaiting paradise. I, the law clerk in his mid-20’s, wished with all my might that the light remain red. Simultaneously the Judge, in his mid-60’s, said: “Frank, I hope that light changes before we get there; we have to keep moving.”25
image
Edward Weinfeld and his eldest Granddaughter, Amy Schulman, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, 1964.
Two decades later, with Weinfeld in his mideighties, his walking habits remained unchanged. One hot, early summer day, after he had attended a New York University graduation function on the Upper West Side, the dean of the law school insisted that a car service be summoned to return Weinfeld, who at that time was chairman of the school’s board of trustees, to his chambers. Despite his age, Weinfeld refused. He was willing to compromise with the dean and agreed to ride the subway part of the way, but the idea of passing up a walk on a summer day was more than he could accept.26 And, a car service—well, it was beyond the pale of thought; such things simply had not existed on the Lower East Side where Weinfeld had grown up.
Weinfeld’s taste in restaurants was similarly modest. One evening, the judge and Mrs. Weinfeld were invited to a restaurant by close friends. As Weinfeld subsequently explained,
[W]e went to a place one night. I came home and I said, “I don’t think I’m going to accept an invitation to go there again.” I think these restaurants should serve menus where only the host has the price. I was absolutely shocked at some of the charges for entree items. I said, “You know, a family lives on that—a family of four for a week—in its food supply for what was charged for one item.” I said, “I don’t care how much money a man has. It isn’t important; you get good, simple, wholesome food, and that’s sufficient.”27
Weinfeld’s tastes were decidedly not those of wealthy New York lawyers at the outset of the twenty-first century; they were the tastes of the quintessential Lower East Sider at the beginning of the twentieth—fresh blueberry muffins from the Municipal Cafeteria for breakfast,28 lunch at the Horn and Hardart Cafeteria29 (a famous self-service, New York chain in which different choices were available behind glass doors, which a patron could open by inserting the proper coins to pay for the food), and a somewhat more elegant dinner at Longchamps (another old New York chain serving cocktails and modest American, never ethnic, cuisine) or Manny Wolf’s (a steakhouse).30 Despite their proximity, Weinfeld, unlike today’s elite New Yorkers, never frequented the ethnic restaurants of Chinatown, Little Italy, or Greenwich Village, or even the great Jewish restaurants of the Lower East Side, such as Ratner’s and Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House.
Edward Weinfeld had a deep and abiding love for his New York, such that when he left it for more than “seven, eight, or nine days” he “g[o]t kind of restless, . . . ready to return.”31 He missed the city where people knew their neighbors, helped their neighbors, and joined with their neighbors in a community in which they worked and lived their lives and through which they collectively negotiated their place in the larger nation of America.
Two incidents, which occurred when Weinfeld lost small but valuable items on the street, exemplify how he experienced New York. The first occurred in May 1967, when he lost a cufflink while paying a taxi driver. He called the lost property bureau at the police department for a week to see if it had been turned in. The second occurred in May 1975, when he lost a gold Cross pen on the subway. Again, Weinfeld’s response was to write the transit authority to see if the pen had been turned in.32
Neither incident reflects the instincts of a jaded, twenty-first-century New Yorker. Weinfeld appears genuinely to have thought, or at least to have found it reasonable to hope, that someone would find the items he lost and then return them. His thought, or at least hope, offers insight into...

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