I sat next to him once on the dais of an event honoring the federally-funded Legal Services program. I asked him who he represented before he became a judge. "The CIO" was the reply. By that remark he stood with John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and the sit-down strikers at the Flint, Michigan assembly plants who built the industrial unions which in the 1930's, '40's, 50's and even 60's were seen as the hope of the American working class. Industry-wide unions were built to go mano a mano with GM, U.S. Steel, GE, ATT/Western Electric, and the other giant industrial corporations that were the face of American economic might.
He was a labor lawyer for several years, then a judge for 54. He began as a workers compensation judge in 1955. Beginning in 1965 he served on the Union County District Court, County Court and the Superior Court of New Jersey until 1979 when President Jimmy Carter named him to the federal bench. He served in Newark until his death on December 1, 2009. "I will never retire" he said. And he didn't.
In 1982 he took control of the Essex County Jail, citing inhumane over-crowded conditions that violated the constitutional rights of prisoners and detainees. Judge Ackerman kept it under his jurisdiction for 25 years, aided by Special Masters like Newark labor lawyers Bennett Zurofsky and James Zazzali (a former AG who later served as Associate and then Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court). Only when the County built the new jail in 2004 did he relinquish jurisdiction.
A friend of labor he was no friend of corrupt union leaders. He took control of Local 560 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, based in Union City. Declaring it a racketeer-dominated organization at the urging of the Dept. of Justice he used the civil RICO law to take it from the hands of the Provenzano group. He put the Local's finances, and its pension, health, and welfare funds in the hands of court-supervised trustees.
Judge Ackerman was also a NJ Workers' Compensation hearing office as well as the original US District Court who managed the entire original docket of asbestos cases in the early 1980's. That wave of cases included Austin v Johns Manville with hundreds f plaintiffs. The labored hard to negotiate an amicable resolution of that matter.
ReplyDeleteIronically he sat by designation on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that held in the Cassens Transportation case that injured workers had a right to bring a RICO action against employers, insurance companies and defense medical experts. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court denied a Petition for Certiorari and sustained the decision of the favorable decision of the 6rh Circuit. See http://tinyurl.com/yjjgau3