The NY Times has the article here.
He helped write the legal briefs in Brown v. Board of Ed.
He was appointed to the bench by President Lyndon Johnson.
He is known as an iconoclast, who rarely wears his robes in court, and comes down off the bench to sit across from the defendant during sentencing.
He is an outspoken critic of the sentencing guidelines, and the mass incarceration philosophy of the last thirty years.
He has written about the philosophical problems with criminalizing and sentencing individuals for possession of pornographic material that appeals to their individual prurient interests and obsessions over which they have little control.
The NY Times article on that is here:
“I don’t approve of child pornography, obviously,” [Judge Weinstein] said in an interview this week. But, he also said, he does not believe that those who view the images, as opposed to producing or selling them, present a threat to children.
“We’re destroying lives unnecessarily,” he said. “At the most, they should be receiving treatment and supervision
He handled the Vietnam era Agent Orange class action lawsuit. He is the co-author of one of the signature treaties on evidence: Weinstein Korn and Miller on Evidence.
He is one of the wisest men we have ever met, and he is singularly the greatest trial judge of this last 100 years.
Judge Jack B. Weinstein, the best of the best.