Judicial Reports: The Judge Who Came in From the Cold
By Jason Boog
Posted 10-06-06
She is one of only two challengers to beat a Manhattan Civil Court incumbent in 15 years. Now the upstart is all establishment — which is why her re-election is unopposed.
In 1996, a lowly law secretary named Eileen A. Rakower made judicial history in Manhattan, beating a Civil Court Democratic incumbent in a system that — then as now — heavily favored the party machine’s pre-anointed choices.
These days, many attorneys praise Rakower’s quiet, effective courtroom management. But the fact is, voters won’t get a chance to meet her again. This year, Rakower will be re-elected in a completely uncontested race, profiting from the same system she bucked so many years ago.
A decade ago, Rakower challenged incumbent Civil Court justice Jay Stuart Dankberg in a hard-fought Fourth District primary. She campaigned up and down east Manhattan, from 14th Street to 96th Street, without the blessing of party leaders.
Openly lesbian, she mustered backing from the gay community and claimed a reformer’s mantle, trumpeting her lack of official support.
A source close to her campaign who requested anonymity noted that Rakower raised and spent an estimated $50,000 on her campaign. “She rang doorbells, shook hands, and went to political clubs where she wasn’t necessarily loved,” he said. “It’s a cool little political story. A very qualified person actually got elected to the bench.”
On the other side, longtime campaign consultant Jerry Skurnik (from the firm Prime New York) helmed the incumbent’s unsuccessful campaign, and he still remembers the ill-fated election ten years later: “[Dankberg] had all the public support,” he said, citing a list of Democratic Party leaders who backed his candidate.
The incumbent even benefited from the backing of his wife, Louise Dankberg, then a well-connected Democratic Party district leader in Manhattan. Rakower, by contrast, "had no support from politicians," said Skurnik, adding, "The fact that she was a woman probably helped."
The Rakower campaign source echoed that surmise about judicial races: “When a man runs against a woman in New York County, he generally loses,” he said. (For a closer look at that claim, see LexMetrics.)
But, according to Skurnik, the deathblow came from the New York City Bar when Rakower secured an "approved" rating while Dankberg received a “not approved.” (While the evaluation interview is a closed process, Skurnik noted that there had been complaints about Dankberg’s judicial temperament, and when The New York Times endorsed Rackow, the paper cited Dankberg’s “wisecracking and other inappropriate courtroom behavior.”)
Dankberg, now a private attorney practicing in Manhattan, did not return calls for comment.
Just like that, Rakower had brought the party machinery to a halt. By the Board of Elections reported tally, Rakower won 2,977 votes against Dankberg’s 2,420. However narrowly, she had knocked the party-backed incumbent off his traditionally guaranteed judicial seat.
Yet now the wheel has come full circle.
Political consultant Ernest Lendler of Branford Communications has worked on many Civil Court races, and he noted that Westchester, Rockland, and Richmond counties are the primary exceptions to an ironclad rule: “Most other places in New York, the dominant party controls judicial selection,” he said, explaining how Democratic-backed Manhattan incumbents are insulated from competition.
This likely explains why Rakower, despite having made her name as an outsider, has now been welcomed by the machine. Her name didn’t appear on the Civil Court primary ballot this Fall, and she will run uncontested in the general election. The incumbency protection system will not falter this time.
Judge Rakower declined to be interviewed for this profile, but her biography is public record.
Rakower earned her B.A. at State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton in 1981. Three years later in 1984 she graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, followed by a stint as a staff attorney in the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society.
After a few years, Rakower moved into the courthouse, becoming principle law secretary to then Civil Court judge Herbert J. Adlerberg in 1987. Two years later, the 29-year-old attorney was featured in a long profile in Newsday entitled: “The Lesbian Baby Boom.”
That profile referred to Rackower as, “the gently wisecracking extrovert from Long Island,” recounting her successful efforts to help her partner, attorney Susan Hendricks, conceive through artificial insemination.
Following her judicial coup a decade later, Rakower took the bench and, in a not uncommon practice, was assigned to the Criminal Court. Her biggest early case was People v. Spector, a trial involving two union employees arrested during a protest in front of the Manhattan offices of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
In all, 38 protestors were arrested that day, and nearly 20 police officers were injured.
Stanley Kopilow, a partner at the firm Hopkins & Kopilow, defended a number of protestors arrested that day, including the two in People v. Spector. “[Former Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani tried to build the new MTA headquarters in Manhattan without union labor, and a lot of people were unhappy,” he explained.
In 1998, prosecutors had subpoenaed videotaped footage of the protest from news organizations, but they took more than four months to arraign the suspects even after receiving the tapes.
Kopilow argued that the slowness of the District Attorney’s office violated his clients’ right to a speedy trial. Rakower granted dismissal, writing that prosecutors had simply delayed too long: “Once the People were in possession of the videotapes it was incumbent upon them to move the case forward. The People cannot rely on the ‘exceptional circumstances’ exclusion while they evaluate their case,” she wrote.
In 2001, the Appellate Term, First Department unanimously reversed her decision, ruling that “circumstance hardly serves to diminish the materiality of the videotapes,” granting prosecutors extra time to assemble the case against the construction workers under a speedy trial exemption.
As for the litigator's perspective, Kopilow remembered his time in Rakower’s court favorably. That same year, another protester had a “rushed” trial that produced an unhappier verdict for the defense. He recalled a much smoother experience in Rakower’s courtroom: “She made it real clear without raising her voice, what was supposed to happen in her courtroom. That’s all you can ask for in a judge.”
In 2003, Rakower was assigned a complicated maritime law case that fell under Civil Court jurisdiction, Fireman's Fund Ins. Co. v. Orient Overseas Container Line Ltd. In that case, an insurance company sued for damages due to a shipping company’s delayed delivery.
Charles E. Murphy, an attorney from Tisdale & Lennon, defended the shipping line. Most maritime law cases end up in federal courts, and it was Murphy’s first argument in front of a Civil Court judge.
“You go into federal court, you have the judge’s undivided attention,” said Murphy, amazed by Rakower’s crowded courtroom and overloaded docket.
Rakower heard oral arguments for 20 minutes, weighing complicated federal case law governing maritime disputes. Ultimately, she granted Murphy’s motion for summary judgment, dismissing the lawsuit against his clients.
“I thought the motion wasn’t going to get the time it deserved, but I was wrong,” Murphy concluded. “She’d done her homework. I was impressed.”
According to the Unified Court System website, Rakower now handles Small Claims Court cases.
While Rakower has kept a low profile in the news during the last ten years, some interesting facts about her life can be gleaned from public disclosure forms.
She listed herself as single on the 2004 Annual Statement of Financial Disclosure that she filed with the Ethics Commission for the Unified Court System. (The rest of her family situation is unclear, because the commission redacts all “unemancipated children” when the forms are released for public inspection.)
By Ethics Commission guidelines, judges are required to list “the nature and amount of any income in excess of $1,000” — income including investments, real estate, and trusts — accrued during the filing year.
In those filings, Rakower listed stocks invested in a “Liquidated Schwab Account,” which included the companies Audible, Pfizer, and Plug Power. She also listed a Smith Barney account that included investments in Home Depot, Lowe's, and Microsoft.
As for her quiet campaign for re-election, filings at the state Board of Elections provide a window into her spending for this uncontested race. According to campaign disclosure forms filed at the Board of Elections, The Committee to Re-Elect Judge Eileen Rakower raised $16,400 for her campaign.
John Gutierrez, a Mirran Group consultant, processed the prerequisite signatures for Rakower’s ceremonial re-election bid. “Rakower ran as a reformer ten years ago, she’s very committed to not having any sign of impropriety,” he noted when asked about the campaign.
Out of the five uncontested Civil Court incumbents in Manhattan, Judge Rakower’s committee has raised the second highest sum for her re-election bid. The Committee to Re-Elect Judge Arthur Birnbaum raised $19,010 for his campaign, and Jane Solomon has spent $11,181 of her own money for her re-election bid.
Rakower consultant Gutierrez explained the fundraising process simply: “Mainly, we had a committee of attorneys who knew her over the course of her career, [and] they volunteered to do the fundraising for her,” he said.
The majority of her contributions came in a collection of small sums, donated by friends and attorneys, of $250 or less. Attorney David Rozenholc contributed $1,000 to her campaign, and had no qualms about explaining why.
He last appeared before the judge in a hearing a few years after she took the bench and loved her calm and collected courtroom. “I doubt seriously if you talked to any attorney who had complaints,” he said. “She has an incredible judicial demeanor,” he said.
After hearing other attorneys praise her, he said, he decided to support her re-election campaign.
As for expenses, Rakower has spent, to date, $24,125. Of that sum, $23,500 was spent on her consultancy firm. So far, Civil Court candidates have filed the first four out of the required six campaign finance forms. While Rakower has currently spent more than she has to date reported raising for the campaign, the account must be balanced by the final post-election filing.
Although the majority of her published and archived opinions revolve around small claims matters, Rakower made headlines in May with a $2.8 million verdict in the lawsuit, Kazimierz Brulinski v. 10 East End Avenue Owner’s Inc. The 61-year-old plaintiff, a construction worker, had fractured his hip when a scaffold collapsed on a job. In an earlier trial, Supreme Court justice Leland DeGrasse had granted summary judgment for the plaintiff, and Rakower handled the damages portion of the trial.
“It was a large case with a very experienced attorney — David Perecman has won a lot of big verdicts. He’s very aggressive in the courtroom, and he’ll tell you that,” recalled Christopher Murray, a senior attorney at Fiedelman Garfinkel & Lesman who lost that case but left impressed with Rakower’s courtroom.
The courtroom grew tense as medical experts assessed the severity of the plaintiff’s injuries, but Murray remembered a calm, collected environment. “She controlled [Perecman] without yelling or anything. It seems like a small thing, but it’s not. She knows how to control the courtroom without raising her voice,” he concluded.
It was a high opinion of a judge who had cost his clients so much money.
Posted by Jason on October 6, 2006 05:09 PM to Judicial Reports