The federal judge at the center of a litigious pile of ruins is grim, but hopeful.

The lone jurist overseeing thousands of claims arising from the fallout from Sept. 11, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District has expressed a staunch, if not bleak, determination to resolve the consolidated cases before him: If the parties do not cooperate, “we'll die, and our children will die, and our grandchildren will die before this litigation ends.”

One veteran New York litigator lawyer describes Hellerstein as a man of “Solomonic bearing.” Regarded as conscientious and deliberative, Hellerstein is widely praised by those involved in the Sept. 11 litigation.

And with what many say is characteristic honesty, he has displayed a raw frankness about the magnitude of his task.

 “Presiding over these cases is the most challenging activity that I remember ever having been involved in,” Hellerstein said at a recent status conference in the cases. “And I have had a pretty rich experience.”

With a hastily written piece of legislation, signed into law just 11 days after the World Trade Center Towers fell, Congress handed Hellerstein a vague blueprint. The judge became responsible for finding resolution to legal questions that are not only unprecedented, but bear profound emotional weight.

“There is no law on a lot of these issues. There is no developed history,” says Marion Mishkin, who is plaintiffs’ liaison counsel for the personal injury cases that occurred at the World Trade Center site. “His primary concern in this litigation is to create a proper record. This may eventually go before the Supreme Court.”

With just two clerks and a docket to maintain outside of the Sept. 11 litigation, Hellerstein, who declined an interview for this article due to the ongoing litigation, has imposed rigor and a modicum of uniformity on the sprawling claims.
 
“At the start of this, who knew how we were going to handle this thing? It was a litigation monster,” says Marc Moller, liaison counsel for the plaintiffs in the wrongful death cases. “The courtroom was crowded with 150 lawyers for every hearing, and there were different views among counsel on each side. . . . It hasn’t moved as quickly as one would like, but the mere fact that it is not in chaos means he has a good handle on organization.”

Now, the cases are finally beginning to take the shape of more traditional litigation, with depositions and pretrial preparations underway, and settlements progressing. “It is coming into sharper and sharper focus,” says Moller.

The thousands of cases against the City of New York, the Port Authority, and a host of private companies fall into three categories — wrongful deaths, property damage and insurance claims, and respiratory injuries.

The wrongful death suits against airlines and security companies are moving toward trial, which could begin as early as this year. Some of the insurance and property damage claims have been resolved. Perhaps most vexing are the respiratory damage claims filed by emergency workers at Ground Zero — a number Hellerstein has estimated at more than 10,000.

The next step in the litigation is a status conference March 22, in which a trial date may be considered in the few dozen wrongful death cases that have not yet settled.

“9/11 visited on the court an enormous administrative problem — there are insurance, respiratory distress, wrongful death cases — all on separate tracks before the same judge,” says Moller, a partner with Kreindler & Kreindler who has known Hellerstein for 20 years, both socially and professionally. “But he is a judicial optimist. He has a sense that people will come to the right decision, sometimes at trial, sometimes in settlement.”

In the absence of being able to bring the dead hijackers into court and hold them accountable through the American judicial system, the suits before Hellerstein have come to represent at least a small part of a primal pursuit of justice.

He is dealing in many of the cases with plaintiffs who, no matter what their personal motivations, are part of a national quest.

Hellerstein has at times treated them gingerly and, some defense lawyers say, too generously. “He is a patient, polite, courteous man,” says a defense lawyer who requested anonymity. “I think perhaps a bit too patient with some of the plaintiffs' lawyers.”

In some regards, no matter what Hellerstein does, it will not be enough, or it will be too much. There is, for example his suggestion in November that New York City’s liability might be capped at $1 billion in the cases filed by emergency workers who claim that the injuries and illnesses they suffered as a result of being at the cleanup site could have been prevented.

The defense was happy, of course, but plaintiffs were affronted, their lawyers arguing that the liability could go up by at least $500 million because of insurance policies held by contractors who helped with the cleanup.

During the very first court conference in the litigation nearly four years ago, Hellerstein made clear he was aware of the gaping lack of a tested procedure for handling the whirlwind of novel legal questions that arise from the suits.

 “There is no secret formula that will deal with every issue that comes up in this case,” Hellerstein told the more than 100 lawyers assembled in his courtroom in September 2002, according to court transcripts. “What I depend on all of you for is cooperation, civility and candor.  If we all . . . submerge our egos, we will move this case along.”

The modesty and clarity of his goal, by the accounts of those who know Hellerstein well, is an indication of his demeanor both on the bench and off. Complaints from lawyers who have appeared before him are few, and praise is common.

“He’s a very conscientious judge, trying his very best to handle complicated, difficult litigation,” says Frank Granito, Jr., who represents plaintiffs in the Sept. 11 litigation. “No one scores 100 percent all of the time, but if you were to grade him on effort he would get an A-plus. Of course, he’s made rulings that didn’t satisfy everybody. He is trying his level best.”

Lauded for his preparedness and efficiency, Hellerstein maintains a timeliness that impresses at least one civil defense lawyer, who did not want to be named because of ongoing litigation. She recalls that on a particular motion in the Sept. 11 litigation, Hellerstein received in April “several hundred pages of argument — bankers boxes to wade through.”

By June, he was hearing arguments, and by December, had rendered a decision.

Many lawyers on both sides of the litigation blame the federal government for delaying progress in the wrongful death cases.

At issue was federal foot-dragging in delivering much-needed testimony and evidence from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for discovery.

“He kept pounding the table verbally, almost in anger, that the government was not more forthcoming and cooperative,” says Moller. Hellerstein had ruled in April that the TSA’s actions “threatens to emasculate” plaintiffs' due process rights, but the decision was appealed. The delays finally ended last fall when Congress effectively told the administration to make public much of the information it wanted to keep secret, and depositions began.
 
Then, in December, Hellerstein brought the litigation another step forward by appointing two special masters, Hofstra Law School dean Aaron Twerski and Cornell Law School professor James Henderson, to help coordinate the cases.

While Hellerstein has expressed confidence in court proceedings about the progress of the wrongful death suits and property damage cases, a frustration with the magnitude of the emotionally fraught respiratory claims also emerges.

Unlike the wrongful death cases, the plaintiffs are alive, and some suffering. It is not a matter of resolving a family’s grief and loss, but remedying the needs of thousands of workers who feel wronged, some of whom need to cover immediate medical expenses. Hellerstein has called the respiratory damage cases the tract of litigation that is “most relevant and most interesting.”

“For reasons that are obvious, the ability to manage 11,000 cases is probably well beyond any district judge,” said Hellerstein on December 11. “The prospect of concluding those cases within the lifetime of a judge or younger lawyers, or children of those younger lawyers, and perhaps the grandchildren of the younger lawyers, is speculative.”

Born and raised in the Bronx, Hellerstein married a Bronx High School of Science classmate, Mildred Markow. The couple has three children, one son who is a lawyer living in Israel, and two daughters, one of whom is also a lawyer.

After earning undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia University, Hellerstein clerked for Judge Edmund Palmieri in the Southern District of New York. (Palmieri hired Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a clerk shortly after Hellerstein left the post to serve in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps.)

A longtime associate and partner in the Manhattan office of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, Hellerstein was co-head of the firm’s litigation department when President Bill Clinton nominated him to the federal bench in 1998.

Hellerstein has been a reliable contributor to national Democratic races. He gave at least $2,500 to the 1996 Clinton/Gore campaign and has contributed to the campaigns of U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, and U.S. Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts.

He is, in the words of one lawyer who has litigated before Hellerstein numerous times, a “liberal” judge.

“I think that a liberal judicial philosophy comes into play in his decision-making,” says the lawyer. “In terms of the Sept. 11 litigation, I think it is obvious in his concern for the wrongful death suits. I’m not so sure other judges would have been quite so understanding.”

Indeed, a handful of controversial rulings during the last five years of Hellerstein have brought him both praise and approbation — most frequently from socially conservative critics. In 2004, Hellerstein ordered the Pentagon and other government agencies to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups asking for documents about detention and interrogation activities regarding prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo.

In descriptions of Hellerstein’s personality, biblical analogies abound. They resonate, perhaps, with Hellerstein’s deep commitment to Judaism.

Off of the bench, Hellerstein’s involvement in his faith is evident. He serves on a taskforce for the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance that addresses the needs of Orthodox Jewish women who want a divorce. The judge has also been a trustee of the Ramaz School, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school on the Upper East Side, and president of the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York.
 
 “He is a God-fearing man, a religious man, to be sure,” says Granito, the Sept. 11 plaintiffs’ lawyer. “He has patience and wisdom.”

But in a case that by its very nature might lead some judges with deeply rooted faith to convey religious beliefs in the courtroom, Hellerstein has kept any mention of religion to a minimum during the World Trade Center litigation, say those familiar with the case. If it emerges, it comes out subtly, as it did last fall.

In discussing the calendar in the Sept. 11 litigation, Hellerstein reminded lawyers in early fall that they would break for Thanksgiving, and noted that there are some “major Jewish holidays coming up.”

In closing, Hellerstein sounded a bit like the “Old Testament prophet” that the veteran litigator likened him to — but one with a 21st century sense of inclusiveness, and not least, a measure of hopefulness.

 “The notion of a New Year for the Jewish calendar I think everyone can share, because we all can share in the sense of taking stock in what's important in our lives and resolving to do better in those things that are important,” said Hellerstein. “Just like resolutions in January, we make them all in the great spirit of optimism, and then we become frustrated that we are not able to live up on our expectations.  But it’s better to have the expectations, I feel, than not to do [the litigation] at all."