Pomerantz Settles Ground-Breaking BP Litigation

POMERANTZ MONITOR | MARCH APRIL 2021

After nine years of hard-fought litigation, Pomerantz recently obtained a confidential, favorable monetary settlement from BP plc for our nearly three dozen institutional investor clients from around the globe that had sought to recover losses caused by BP’s devastating 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the worst such disaster in U.S. history. Our ground-breaking work created a new path forward for investors in foreign-traded securities to pursue remedies in U.S. courts, while establishing cutting-edge precedent for securities claims brought under English common law.

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank less than 100 miles from the U.S. coast, the price of BP’s ordinary shares and American Depository Shares (ADSs) plummeted, amid revelations of the spill’s true scale and BP’s inadequate safety commitments and inability to contain it. While BP investors could pursue U.S. federal securities law claims in U.S. courts to recover their losses in its U.S.-traded ADSs, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Morrison v. Nat’l Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U.S. 247 (2010) barred use of those laws to reach foreign-traded securities, undoing decades of prior precedent. Investors in BP’s London-traded ordinary shares seemed to lack legal recourse in U.S. courts.

Pomerantz’s BP litigation has the distinction of being the earliest successful workaround to the roadblocks set by Morrison. Our novel arguments – and our successes – paved the way for investors, both foreign and domestic, to pursue foreign law claims, against a foreign company, seeking recovery for foreign-traded shares, in U.S. courts post-Morrison.

Given our institutional investor clients’ lack of remedy under the U.S. federal securities laws for their losses in BP’s ordinary shares, starting in 2012, we began filing individual lawsuits alleging common law claims, which were consolidated for pretrial proceedings before U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison of the Southern District of Texas. Thereafter, Pomerantz survived three rounds of BP’s motions to dismiss, as well as BP’s related motions for reconsideration and other contested motions, to safeguard our clients’ rights. In the process, the Firm earned a series of closely followed, cutting-edge wins on behalf of the 125+ institutional investors who ultimately pursued such claims against BP.

In 2013, Pomerantz survived BP’s first motion to dismiss, which had argued that the U.S. Constitution’s Dormant Commerce Clause and the forum non conveniens doctrine required dismissal of our U.S. lawsuits in deference to U.K. courts, which impose a loser-pays regime that disincentivizes high-risk, contingent litigation. This win secured the rights of U.S. institutional investors, who also had U.S. federal law claims concerning BP’s U.S.-traded American Depository Shares, to simultaneously pursue English common law claims concerning their BP ordinary share losses in U.S. court.

In 2014, Pomerantz survived BP’s second motion to dismiss, securing the same rights for foreign institutional investors by again defeating BP’s forum non conveniens argument, which this time had argued that non-domestic investors, including ones based in the U.K., should have their cases dismissed for pursuit in U.K. courts. We also persuaded Judge Ellison to reject BP’s argument that a U.S. federal statute, the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998, should be extended to cover foreign law claims and thereby serve to extinguish them in deference to non-existent U.S. federal statutory remedies. This win opened the door for institutions worldwide to pursue claims within the limitations period, including Pomerantz clients from Canada, the U.K., France, the Netherlands, and Australia.

In 2017, we survived BP’s third motion to dismiss, securing the rights of investors who retained BP stock, rather than purchased it anew, in reliance on the fraud to seek recovery under English law for investment losses. The U.S. Supreme Court had barred this approach, often called a “holder claim,” under the U.S. federal securities law in Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U.S. 723 (1975). However, we spent years developing detailed documentary evidence with our clients and their outside investment management firms and consulting with an English law expert to develop robust amended complaints alleging the predicates to a “holder claim” theory under English law. To do so, we fought to secure our right to amend our complaints to plead this theory, over BP’s opposition, which Judge Ellison granted. This years-long effort developed facts evidencing actual, documented reliance by our clients and their investment managers on specific aspects of the alleged fraud and their contemporaneous decisions on identifiable dates to maintain their BP investment, rather than reducing it, reallocating it, or eliminating it altogether. The Court agreed that, for some Pomerantz clients, we had pled cognizable damages, legally sufficient reliance on the alleged fraud, and adequately memorialized investment retention decisions. This ground-breaking ruling has precedential value for both U.S. and Commonwealth of Nations courts, given the scarcity of precedent validating a “holder claim” theory of recovery for investors.

Beyond these motion wins, Pomerantz also applied considerable pressure on BP through our extensive, sustained discovery efforts. The Firm oversaw a multi-year effort to access BP’s most relevant documentary evidence. We worked with e-discovery vendors to run analytics, threading, and search terms on 2 terabytes of BP materials (~1.5 million documents) from prior oil spill litigation and oversaw a review team that pared the data set down to 45,000 documents. Having done so, we pressed BP for additional documents and later pursued a successful motion to compel, over BP’s opposition, that resulted in the Court’s ordering BP to run 60+ Pomerantz -authored searches on the email accounts and document drives of the individual defendants, other high-value BP employees, and BP Investor Relations personnel. We oversaw efforts to search and review the resulting ~150,000+ documents. We worked with consultants to load the post-review documents into a trial preparation platform to enhance our ability to examine witnesses, brief further motions, and prepare for trial. Throughout these efforts, we organized the other plaintiff firms with lawsuits on file to contribute resources and attorney hours, achieving efficiencies through collaboration that kept our clients’ litigation expenses relatively low.

In early 2021, before our clients or their outside investment managers were ever deposed, we succeeded in resolving the BP litigation for a confidential, favorable monetary settlement for our nearly three dozen clients, including three newly signed clients who, just months earlier, had switched representation after eight years of litigation to retain Pomerantz as their BP counsel.

Pomerantz’s BP litigation was led by Partner Matthew L. Tuccillo, who briefed and argued most motions on behalf of the Firm and its clients, oversaw the Individual Action Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee, and served as sole interface with BP and the Court on behalf of all institutional plaintiffs. Pomerantz’s BP team included Managing Partner Jeremy A. Lieberman, Senior Counsel Marc I. Gross, and Partner Jennifer Pafiti, among many other contributing attorneys and staff.

Pomerantz Submits Amicus Brief to Supreme Court

POMERANTZ MONITOR | MARCH APRIL 2021

By The Editors

In a hotly contested issue before the United States Supreme Court affecting investors’ rights to recoup damages from publicly traded companies as a result of securities fraud, Pomerantz LLP submitted the sole amicus brief on behalf of twenty-seven of the foremost U.S. scholars in the field of evidence. One of the two issues before the High Court in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. et al v. Arkansas Teachers Retirement System, et al. (No. 20-222) squarely affects investors’ ability to pursue claims collectively as a class: whether, in order to rebut the presumption of reliance originated by the Court in the landmark Basic v. Levinson decision, defendants bear the burden of persuasion—as every circuit court to address the issue has held—or whether they bear only the much lower burden of production, as Goldman Sachs argues. The burden of production is easily satisfied by the mere recital of words or the introduction of evidence without actual persuasive effect.

When interpreting statutes, the Supreme Court and the circuit courts sometimes create presumptions to best effectuate congressional intent. That is exactly how the Basic presumption came to be. The Court determined that the congressional policy embodied in the Securities Act of 1934 called for the full and accurate disclosure of information related to securities to promote the integrity of the market and the setting of “just” prices. The Court reasoned that advancing that goal would best be achieved through a presumption of class-wide reliance if plaintiffs show, among other things, that a defendant made material misrepresentations that affected a security’s price.

Pomerantz argues that Federal Rule of Evidence 301, which shifts the burden of production but not that of persuasion, is merely a default rule that, by its own terms, is inapplicable because the substantive law at issue necessarily demands that the defendants actually show, i.e., prove, that the presumption is defeated. It would be palpably unfair – and inconsistent with the reason behind the Supreme Court’s creation of the presumption in the first place – to impose on investors the high burden of satisfying the presumption, only to have defendants overcome it by merely introducing some evidence creating a dispute as to price impact.

“Institutional and retail investors alike have the right to hold those that defraud them accountable,” said Emma Gilmore, the Pomerantz Partner spearheading the effort, “and pursuing their claims as a class has been a critical step in their pursuit of justice.”

Read Pomerantz’s full amicus brief to the Supreme Court at pomlaw.com/AmicusMar2021.

85 Years — A Long History of Setting Precedent

POMERANTZ MONITOR | MARCH APRIL 2021

By The Editors

In celebration of the founding of the Pomerantz Firm 85 years ago, the Monitor will feature a highlight from its history in each issue in 2021.

In the last issue, we began at the beginning, following Abe Pomerantz’s journey from a one-room office to his status as “dean” of the plaintiffs’ bar.

Today, we’re looking at two early Pomerantz cases that set key precedents for investors rights — Ross v. Bernhard and Gartenberg v. Merrill Lynch.

In 1969, Partner William E. Haudek appeared before the Supreme Court in Ross v. Bernhard, litigation which secured the groundbreaking decision that guaranteed injured investors the right to a jury trial in derivative actions. The issue before the court was whether the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for the right of trial by jury in cases where the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars, also applied a right to a jury trial in stockholders’ derivative actions in which the actual damages may not come in a monetary form.

Pomerantz successfully argued that the Seventh Amendment did apply, with Justice Byron White writing the Court’s opinion, that “the right to jury trial attaches to those issues in derivative actions as to which the corporation, if it had been suing in its own right, would have been entitled to a jury.”

Justice White further wrote:

Derivative suits have been described as one kind of ‘true’ class action. We are inclined to agree with the description, at least to the extent it recognizes that the derivative suit and the class action were both ways of allowing parties to be heard in equity who could not speak at law. ... Given the availability in a derivative action of both legal and equitable remedies, we think the Seventh Amendment preserves to the parties in a stockholder’s suit the same right to a jury trial that historically belonged to the corporation and to those against whom the corporation pressed its legal claims.

And so it was ordered by the Supreme Court that shareholders have a right to a jury trial in derivative actions.

Gartenberg v. Merrill Lynch was a major victory for investors that first came disguised in defeat. Yes, Pomerantz lost this case but set important precedent that would be recognized and codified into law by the Supreme Court twenty-nine years later.

In 1981, with Partner Stanley M. Grossman serving as plaintiffs’ lead counsel, Pomerantz brought to trial the first case ever tried under the newly enacted Section 36(b) of the Investment Company Act of 1940, in which the Firm argued for a standard of fiduciary duty owed by investment advisors to mutual funds. Plaintiffs argued that Merrill Lynch had violated its fiduciary duty by levying fees that were disproportionately high based on the services it rendered. In other words, the investment advisors were making “too much money” off their clients.

After a bench trial, U.S. District Judge Milton Pollack ruled for defendants, finding that ‘’The compensation paid is high as a matter of numbers but the payment is lawful relative to the gargantuan size of the fund.’’ On Pomerantz’s argument in the case, Judge Pollack added: “[I] can fairly say, having remained abreast of the law on the factual and legal matters that have been presented, that I know of no case that has been better presented so as to give the Court an opportunity to reach a determination, for which the Court thanks you.”

In 2010, the Supreme Court, in Jones v. Harris Associates, turned back to Stan’s argument to adopt “the Gartenberg standard” as the specific standard for assessing whether mutual fund advisors breach fiduciary duties by charging excessive fees. In drafting the High Court’s unanimous opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote “we conclude that Gartenberg was correct in its basic formulation of what §36(b) requires: to face liability under §36(b), an investment adviser must charge a fee that is so disproportionately large that it bears no reasonable relationship to the services rendered and could not have been the product of arm’s length bargaining.”

And with that, “the Gartenberg standard” became, so to speak, the law of the land.

Protecting Investors in a Globalized World

POMERANTZ MONITOR | JANUARY FEBRUARY 2021

By Jeremy A. Lieberman

European Pensions, Europe’s highly regarded information source for pension decision makers and fiduciaries, has honored Pomerantz with its inaugural 2020 Thought Leadership Award. European Pensions selected Pomerantz as the first recipient of this award in recognition that the Firm “has demonstrated the possibility to make a real, material difference to the pension fund space.”

Here, Pomerantz Managing Partner Jeremy Lieberman reflects on the current landscape of global securities litigation and what it takes to protect investors in a globalized world.

In the last several decades, the landscape of global securities litigation has changed dramatically, both in terms of the remedies available to international investors for losses to their portfolios due to fraud and the appetite of investors outside of the United States to pursue litigation.

Since 1995, more than $95 billion has been recovered in securities class actions litigated in the U.S. on behalf of defrauded investors. With landmark recoveries making international news – $6.1 billion in Worldcom in 2005, $7.2 billion in Enron in 2008 and Pomerantz’s $3 billion 2018 settlement in Petrobras – investors outside of the U.S. began to ask: what does this mean for us?

The different rules regarding class action securities litigation in different jurisdictions complicated the path for shareholders around the world wishing to learn about their rights. Further, there were cultural barriers to overcome. Decades ago, many European institutional investors viewed their litigious American counterparts as too aggressive and preferred not to “dirty their hands” in the same way. They tended to accept not being able to participate in recoveries as mere bad luck. While that was the common wisdom then, modern and sophisticated European institutional investors are increasingly proactive. With so much money on the table, they are seeking solutions not just out of best practice but out of fiduciary duty to obtain recoveries for their funds.

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Morrison v. Nat’l Australia Bank Ltd. barred use of the U.S. federal securities laws to recover losses from investments in foreign-traded securities. This ruling exacerbated the sense of unfairness already felt by investors outside of the U.S. Their rights would not be protected, nor could they recover losses, if they purchased shares in the very same company on a non-U.S. exchange as investors that purchased on a U.S. exchange.

The first test of how to deal with the Morrison hurdle arrived almost before the ink on the decision had time to dry. On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and resulting oil spill devastated countless lives and caused immeasurable economic and environmental damage. It also impacted investors. Within weeks, the price of BP’s ordinary shares and its American Depository Shares (“ADS”) plummeted nearly 50%, driven down by revelations that BP’s prior statements regarding its commitment to safety and its ability and preparedness to deal with a large oil spill were misleading.

Although the U.S. federal securities laws protected purchasers of BP’s ADS, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange, the same was not true for the purchasers of BP’s ordinary shares, which trade on the London Stock Exchange (“LSE”). For investors that purchased BP common stock on the LSE, they seemed to have no legal options in the U.S. courts.

Pomerantz responded by developing a new legal theory, placing it at the vanguard of ground-breaking litigation. Through a series of hard-fought victories, Pomerantz secured the right of its clients, both foreign and domestic, to pursue English common law claims in a U.S. federal court to recover their losses in BP’s London-traded common shares and its ADS. This marked the first time, post-Morrison, that institutional investors had been permitted to pursue foreign claims seeking recovery for foreign-traded securities in a U.S. court. The case has now been resolved, with favorable recovery for LSE investors that otherwise would have recovered nothing under Morrison.

Morrison had further consequences for investors of dual-listed shares – a staple feature of most global portfolios. Dual-listed shares (shares traded on more than one exchange) afford institutional investors the opportunity to execute trades on the venue offering the most favorable trading hours, pricing and liquidity at any given moment. However, under Morrison, purchasers of the same dual- listed stock, traded at the same time and injured by the same fraudulent misrepresentations and omissions, might have very different remedies, depending on which exchange shares were bought. Those that purchased on a U.S. exchange would be able to join together with other similarly situated investors to collectively seek compensation in a U.S. class action. Investors purchasing on a foreign exchange, under Morrison, were generally left only the expensive and daunting option of pursuing claims individually in a foreign court likely to be less familiar with and less favorable to securities fraud litigation than those in the U.S.

Continuing its pursuit of justice for defrauded European investors, in 2019, Pomerantz set historic precedent for investors in the dual-listed shares of Perrigo Co. plc, when a U.S. federal court certified parallel classes of investors that purchased Perrigo shares on both the U.S. and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. The ruling was the very first to certify a foreign purchaser class since Morrison. Since then, Pomerantz also successfully achieved certification for parallel classes of investors in a securities class action against Ormat Technologies, Inc., in which the Firm recently achieved a favorable settlement for investors.

In addition to the barriers to recovery for international investors set by Morrison, there have been efforts by the U.S. Chambers of Commerce – a big-business-supporting lobbying group – and the U.S. Congress, to clip the wings of securities class actions. However, they have unwittingly created a monster, spawning new litigations to protect and vindicate investor rights within and beyond the U.S.

Legal counsel must be creative in handling these issues and arriving at solutions that are favorable for international investors. The answer, in some cases, is to bring securities fraud cases in jurisdictions outside of the U.S. Pomerantz is currently representing international clients in international litigations, including, among others, against BRF S.A. (Brazil), Wirecard (Germany), Deutsche Bank AG (Germany), Danske Bank (Denmark) and Tesco PLC (U.K.).

85 Years — A Long Tradition of Innovation

POMERANTZ MONITOR | JANUARY FEBRUARY 2021

By The Editors

In celebration of the founding of the Pomerantz Firm 85 years ago, the Monitor will feature a highlight from its history in each issue in 2021.

Let’s start at the very beginning. In 1926, Abraham Louis Pomerantz, a young graduate of Brooklyn Law School, hung up his shingle in New York City. For years, he shared one small room and a stenographer with three other young lawyers. When one of lawyers had a client visit, the other three would make themselves scarce. But there weren’t many clients in those early days, and the four spent much of their time playing knock rummy.

One day in 1932, Celia Gallin, the widow of Abe’s high school gym teacher, walked in the door. Her husband had left her 20 shares of stock in the National City Bank of New York (today’s Citigroup). Before the market crash of 1929, they had sold for $585 a share; now, in the Great Depression, they traded at $17. Gallin thought there must be someone she could sue to get her money back. Unfortunately, there was not, Abe told her.

A few months later, Ferdinand Pecora took over as Chief Counsel for what had been a bumbling, ineffective Senate probe of the causes of the stock market crash. As Michael Perino, the author of Ferdinand Pecora, the Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance, wrote:

In just a few weeks Pecora turned the investigation around. His first target was City Bank and its Chairman, “Sunshine” Charlie Mitchell. After a whirlwind investigation, Pecora chronicled how Mitchell and the bank’s other executives had manipulated stocks, dodged taxes, ripped off their shareholders, and collected enormous bonuses for peddling shoddy securities to unsuspecting American investors.

Realizing the opportunity that opened up, Abe quickly called Gallin. He still couldn’t get her money back, but he hoped to effect retribution by convincing the court to force the bank’s executives to return their bonuses. Retaining the well-known New York lawyer David Podell to try the case, Abe brought a derivative suit against National City Bank, relying on the disclosures from the Pecora hearings. Abe and Podell won, clawing back $1.8 million in bonuses from the bank’s executives.

A few months later, Pecora held hearings on Chase Manhattan Bank. Abe brought a derivative lawsuit alleging the same wrongdoing Pecora had revealed. The bank settled. Abe thereafter decided to specialize in stockholder suits, and thus began the Firm as we know it.

Again, according to Perino:

In the worst depths of the Great Depression, Pecora paraded a series of elite financiers before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. The sensational disclosures of financial malfeasance galvanized public opinion for reform and led to passage of the first federal securities laws and the Glass-Steagall Act.

...
Until his death in 1982, Abraham Pomerantz was one of the leaders of the plaintiffs’ bar. He helped pioneer derivative suits brought by small shareholders against publicly traded corporations, and the law firm he founded remains a major player in the field.

In 1946, “on the strength of his familiarity with complicated financial transactions and his reputation as a tenacious trial lawyer,” the United States Government appointed Abe as Deputy Chief Counsel (Economics) at Nuremberg. As such, he was senior trial counsel in all cases against German industrialists for collaborating in Nazi war crimes. He left after eight months, frustrated that the prosecutions were impaired by inadequate human and financial resources. Abby Mann, in his introduction to his screenplay, Judgment at Nuremberg, wrote, “The first time I gave Nuremberg any thought was when I met Abraham Pomerantz at a dinner party in New York in 1957. Pomerantz had been one of the prosecutors in the last trials at Nuremberg when the defendants included diplomats, doctors and Judges.”

In 1965, Variety Magazine, which as a rule covered theater and film, sent reporter Ronald Gold to cover a trial that Abe was litigating. Gold wrote it up as a movie review:

Though he doesn’t get top billing, Abe Pomerantz, playing one of two lawyers for a couple of worried investors, does the standout job. Managing to be both breathless and stentorian, the gray-haired portly veteran delivers a ringing indictment of legalistic trickery, all the while letting the audience know that along with his sincere emotion he’s just as clever as the opposition.

In a 1968 feature in Fortune Magazine titled “Abe Pomerantz is Watching You,” Spencer Klaw opined:

If the past is any guide, at one time or another during the next year the officers or directors of scores of large, publicly held corporations will be handed a depressing legal document. It will inform them that they have been named as defendants in a minority-stockholder suit. The news will be particularly depressing if the plaintiff is represented by Abraham Pomerantz... Pomerantz has been suing corporate insiders for thirty-five years, and in four out of five cases the defendants have had to pay sizable amounts of money out of their own pockets.

Abe was often in the spotlight, as in the lively February 1977 interview segment, “Lancelot at Law,” on Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser. On his death in 1982, the New York Times described Abe as “an articulate courtroom orator who reveled in fencing with his political and legal adversaries.”

The late, and esteemed attorney Milton S. Gould eulogized Abe:

The stockholders’ derivative action flourished under the leadership of men like Abe Pomerantz ... and it continues to flourish. I think an enlightened view of its function and usefulness is that the cause of action has proved to be the most effective instrument we have in protecting corporate ownership from misconduct in corporate management. From those cases have evolved useful concepts of fiduciary loyalty and the need for honest full disclosure ... Abe Pomerantz became a hero, and his name became a synonym for the successful prosecution of the plaintiff’s derivative suit.

In 2015, eighty-three years after Celia Gallin first walked into Abe’s office looking for justice, John C. Coffee, Jr., Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia University Law School, wrote in Entrepreneurial Litigation: Its Rise, Fall, and Future:

If this book has found one unassailable hero within the plaintiffs’ bar, it was probably Abe Pomerantz.

A Tribute to RBG

"Women's rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy."

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

POMERANTZ MONITOR | SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2020

We owe a great deal to our notorious RBG.  As co-founder of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, she fought against sex-role stereotyping, arguing and winning five landmark cases before the Supreme Court during the 1970s. These decisions established the principle of equal treatment in the law for women and men and disposed of numerous laws that treated people differently based on outdated gender stereotypes. Later, as a Supreme Court Justice, RBG wrote strong opinions that fiercely advocated for both gender and racial equality.  

RBG’s story is even more compelling because she faced gender discrimination first-hand in law school and her early career. She struggled with the demands of balancing work and family – a theme that is only too familiar to female attorneys today. As a young law student, she also nursed her husband through a bout with cancer and cared for their young daughter. I suspect RBG did not watch much TV. Instead of allowing these challenges to define and defeat her, RBG set out to redefine the law and cleared a path for future generations of women.

It was a sad irony that I learned of RBG’s passing while putting the final touches on a brief in my firm’s case against Wynn Resorts. The litigation arises from allegations that Wynn’s CEO sexually harassed and assaulted the company’s female employees for years, while senior management stood by and did nothing. The case is a stark reminder that much work lies ahead to protect RBG’s legacy and ensure truly equal treatment in the workplace. To be sure, sexual harassment must be tamped out for good, but also the less obvious forms of discrimination – such as gender pay gaps and implicit bias – are still all too prevalent and need to be eradicated. 

Today, we mourn our beloved RBG.  Tomorrow, we must continue her fight.  

Murielle Steven Walsh

Following are brief tributes to RBG from Pomerantz attorneys and a young staff member now applying to law school.

I had the honor to appear for argument before the Supreme Court in 2007 in Stoneridge Investment Partners, LLC vs. Scientific-Atlanta, Inc. Advocates before the Court are often mere pawns; the Justices state their own views and argue their own positions to the other Justices by  questioning the lawyers. It was clear from the outset that the conservative Justices were hostile to my position. But Justice Ginsburg, in her soft, measured voice, threw me a few softball questions to counter their attack. And when my adversary was on his feet, it was Justice Ginsburg who was really on the offensive, making my points better than I had done. She was formidably impressive -- as comfortable and sophisticated in analysis on a complex business case under the federal securities laws as she was with social and Constitutional matters.

Stanley M. Grossman

“Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.”  Justice Ginsburg tirelessly fought to achieve that noble goal.  Faced with tremendous obstacles, she never capitulated but fought for those rights until her last breath.  Justice Ginsburg inspired little girls and women alike to reach for the stars – and made that dream a reality.   She “righted” many “wrongs.”  Rest in Power, Justice Ginsburg. 

Emma Gilmore

“You can do anything--” a phrase many of us have heard, whether from loving parents or encouraging educators. It’s a phrase that implies no barriers and freedom of choice—limited only by our abilities to dream. But it’s a phrase that historically, for many women, included a large and bolded “EXCEPT.” Not for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With three strikes against her as a woman, a mother, and a Jew, Justice Ginsburg lived a life where that “EXCEPT” pushed her to heights that others would have deemed unascertainable. Those “strikes” shaped Justice Ginsburg into the legend we all mourn today; they motivated her unfailing pursuit of equality and tireless quest against discrimination of all kinds. From successfully arguing five gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court in the seventies to issuing landmark decisions against discrimination during decades as a Supreme Court Justice, Justice Ginsburg embodied the biblical phrase, “tzedek tzedek tirdof”—“justice justice you shall pursue,” which hung on the wall of her Supreme Court office. As a Jewish mother and a full-time lawyer— I look in awe at Justice Ginsburg’s trailblazing accomplishments. She is the proof that I, that we all, can turn what others see as deterrents into superpowers, and indeed, do anything.

Tamar A. Weinrib

No other lawyer, writer or legal mind has had as much influence on my legal career as Justice Ginsburg. I attended Rutgers University School of Law—Newark, where she taught from 1963 to 1972. Many of my professors at Rutgers were former students of hers who used her lessons, which shaped me as an attorney. As a law student, I was both a member and co-editor-in-chief of the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal to focus exclusively on the field of women’s rights law and for which Justice Ginsburg was its first faculty advisor. From its inception to this day, the WRLR walks the trail blazed by Justice Ginsburg and focuses on developing her insights on gender and the law. I am one of many, many attorneys who would not be where I am today without Justice Ginsburg, and her influence guides every case I read, argument I make and word I write as an attorney.

Brian Calandra

I learned of the name Ruth Bader Ginsburg during my early legal studies. Whilst I found Supreme Court opinions interesting, there was something particularly fascinating when the voice was that of Justice Ginsburg, especially in her dissenting opinions. In a male-dominated profession, Justice Ginsburg was a personal role model, particularly for her courage, her strength, her devotion to justice and her commitment to equality. Her legacy will thankfully live way beyond the generations that were lucky enough to witness her make history. 

Jennifer Pafiti