Calling her quarter century on the Court of Appeals (the last 15 as chief judge) “the role of a lifetime,” Kaye led the audience on a whirlwind tour of the state’s judicial system. She began by reviewing efforts to improve child welfare proceedings and hire more judges in the overburdened family courts, before moving on to the state of civil justice, which has been affected dramatically by the nation’s current financial crisis—some counties’ housing courts have seen 200-percent increases in foreclosure cases. Kaye also discussed one of her most-lauded achievements as chief judge, jury reform, calling the American jury system “a rare opportunity to show the public firsthand a justice system that is modern, up-to-date, effective, and efficient.” In 1996 Kaye famously eliminated professional exemptions, compelling notable figures like former mayor Rudolph Giuliani ’68, newscaster Dan Rather, actor Robert De Niro, and even Kaye herself to show up for jury duty. Her legacy also includes a host of initiatives tackling domestic violence, drug abuse, and mental health through the courts. And it was Kaye who broke the New York judiciary’s glass ceiling: The first woman to serve on the state’s highest court, let alone lead it, she left it with a female majority.

Throughout her speech, and particularly as she concluded her remarks, Kaye thanked many of her colleagues, especially Jonathan Lippman ’68, now Kaye’s successor, who was then still the presiding justice of the Appellate Division. Kaye, the longest-serving chief judge in the history of the post, deemed it “a privilege beyond description to labor in the cause of justice alongside the greatest people on earth.”

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Why are you pushing the “zero option” now?
I read in the press after 9/11 that if those airplanes had carried nuclear weapons, New York and Washington would have been destroyed. It scared the living daylights out of me. So I called some of my old staff and asked them, “Were you right or was Reagan right?”

That’s how you became the catalyst behind the “Gang of Four”— former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn— who are advocating eliminating nuclear arms. But with the North Koreans testing their nuclear device and the Iranians enriching uranium, this doesn’t seem the time to go to zero.
All of this makes it essential to go to zero. It’s got to be done universally. It also cannot realistically materialize unless we develop a method of preventing cheating. We must first establish a recognition about the international desirability and necessity of zero, and build on that. It depends on our leadership or the leadership of other countries—and, in my opinion, the declaration of the “ought” by the General Assembly of the United Nations. There is no other vehicle in the world which can establish the “ought.” Now, it is much too weak and unable to bring about the “is,” but it can establish the “ought.”

Would you support the use of force against Iran if it doesn’t stop the development of nuclear weapons?
Yes. If they got it, and the Pakistani scientist admits he sold the goddam thing, I would.

You have always described yourself as a liberal Democrat. How did you become Ronald Reagan’s arms negotiator?
When Reagan was elected, I was in Madrid as President Carter’s negotiator for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the continuation of the 1975 Helsinki Conference. I got a call from Al Haig, who was going to be the secretary of state. “The president wants to reappoint you.” I knew Haig quite well and said, “Al, I’m a Democrat.” He says, “He knows you’re a Democrat and he’s reappointing two Democrats: you and Ambassador Mike Mansfield in Japan.” Madrid lasted till 1983, then I was back in private life. President Reagan, out of the blue, calls me up and says, “Max, we’re gonna restart our negotiations on arms.” I knew he had just seen Gorbachev in Geneva. “And I want you to head up the American delegation.” I said, “I’m not equipped—I don’t know the first thing about the nuclear arms issue.” He said, “I know, but you and I worked very closely in Madrid.” And he then said with a laugh, “Actually you’re the only fellow Shultz and [Caspar] Weinberger could agree on.”

As an aide to Humphrey, you worked for the passage of key civil rights legislation. How did you feel seeing an African American sworn in as president?
Really, my chest bursts with satisfaction. My concern is that he is inadequately prepared. But he can learn.

You had been a pacifist during World War II—a pretty unusual thing for a Jewish kid from the Bronx. And as a conscientious objector, you were involved in a range of government-approved activities.
I was an only child; I went to a Jewish school. But the exposure to the world was not there. During the war, I worked as a hospital nurse for mentally handicapped children in Maine, and was involved in soil conservation work and the University of Minnesota’s Starvation Experiment, which was supposed to help the authorities learn what challenges they would face with POWs and concentration camp survivors. We had a 1,500 calorie-a-day diet and 3,000 calorie-a-day work regimen. I went from 161 pounds to under 120.

Looking back on your life, what are you proudest of?
The starvation project. Everything else took time, a little energy—but the thing that hurt and I paid a price for was the Starvation Experiment.

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That spirit drove this public defender to find a more comprehensive way to represent people thrust into the criminal justice system. Enter the Bronx Defenders. Founded in 1997 with the help of a city grant, the Bronx Defenders tackle the broader economic and social contexts that affect their clients—from immigration status to child welfare issues. It’s an approach that turns the traditional public defense system on its head. “Public defenders only focus on the circumstances of the arrest and have no idea about the other areas in a person’s life that may have destabilized them to begin with,” Steinberg says. “We ask the broader questions: Are you receiving public aid? What’s your immigration status? Where are your kids? Nobody asks these kinds of questions. We do. Our job is to counsel and represent the human being. We try to get to know them, understand them, and make sure that what’s good about them is understood.”

During the last decade or so, Steinberg has assembled a diverse staff of criminal defense, housing, immigration, family law, employment, and civil rights lawyers, social workers, parent advocates, investigators, public benefits specialists, community organizers, and administrative staff—120 in all. The Bronx Defenders Web site profiles every one of them, even the janitor. According to Steinberg, her organization assists some 14,000 people annually with everything from navigating the criminal justice system to housing and health issues. “She is truly a visionary,” says Justine Olderman, managing attorney at the Bronx Defenders, decrying what she calls the “cookie-cutter approach” to criminal defense.

Clients arrive at the Bronx Defenders’ doorstep through the criminal and family courts. The office also gets lots of walk-ins, who sometimes only want to do something as simple as making a copy of a document. The office always obliges. And all clients, no matter what the request, are made to feel comfortable. A bright reception area, filled with couches, plump pillows, an assortment of toys, telephones, and free coffee, welcomes them. “I’ve put a lot of thought into our physical space. We want our clients to feel that this is a place they can trust and where they feel safe,” she says, with a hint of pride in her voice. “Every client deserves to be treated with compassion and dignity.”

Likewise, Steinberg insists that every client served by the Bronx Defenders leaves feeling that his or her story has been heard, regardless of the outcome. “Sometimes the case is so strong, you can’t stop the train,” she says. “But at the end of the day, I tell my staff, if all you can do is enable your clients to believe that their dignity has been preserved and you have shown respect for them, then you’ve succeeded.” She underscores her point, as she sips her coffee, adding, “Some of my biggest fans are doing life in prison.”

It’s not difficult to see why Steinberg has fans. She’s a sincere woman with genuine conviction. You believe her when she talks about how she wants to help people who have been mistreated by a system that she considers heartless and complacent. Her smile is warm and endearing, her enthusiasm, contagious. She chuckles and confesses that she can’t walk by someone asking for money without giving them a few coins. “I always look them in the eye and ask them how they’re doing,” she says, a habit that has prompted her 13-year-old daughter to call her “the nicest person she’s ever met.” Her daughter has a point. Steinberg, a native New Yorker, is the kind of do-gooder that makes you want to empty your pocket for the next homeless person you run across.

Steinberg didn’t always think law was the way to accomplish her goals. At the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970s, she majored in women’s studies. Her ambition, even then, was a lofty one: She wanted to change the world. Eventually she came to think she could do that by becoming a lawyer and advocating for women’s rights, so she applied to NYU and made her way back to her hometown. At first, law school wasn’t quite as inspirational as she’d imagined. “I was hardly a stellar law student,” she laughs. “I sat in the back row and did not participate.” As she put it when she received her Alumna of the Year award from Law Women last February, “Don’t underestimate the power and the passion of the quiet students in the back row trying to stay unnoticed.” In her second year, Steinberg took a criminal defense clinic that involved helping women in a maximum-security prison in Bedford, New York. “I literally spent the year getting to know women and listening to their stories,” she says. She was hooked. Today, she’s still listening to clients who want to be heard—and in the process, she’s achieved a sliver of her goal: She is changing the world, at least in her own corner of the Bronx.

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Ten years later, the destination includes the highest court of the land. Morawetz and her small but strongly idealistic army of law students were involved in the bulk of immigration matters before the U.S. Supreme Court over the past decade. Even after graduating, many clinic alumni have stayed in the field. Now as practitioners, they are fanned out across America and points overseas to apply the clinic’s formula of legislative effort, community advocacy, and media outreach in addition to impact litigation.

This year, for instance, students Andrea Gittleman ’09 and Sara Johnson ’09 drafted an amicus curiae brief to the high court on behalf of the Supreme Court Immigration Law Working Group, a coalition of major immigrant rights organizations monitoring the pending matter of Flore-Figueroa v. U.S. In their brief, and in strategy assistance given to plaintiff counsel, Gittleman and Johnson argue that workers who submit to employers falsified documents containing randomly created Social Security numbers should not be subjected to the “aggravated identity theft” penalty that warrants a mandatory two-year jail sentence.

The clinic’s agenda has expanded far beyond NYU Law as some who have co-taught alongside Morawetz have replicated the program at Yale Law School, the City University of New York School of Law, and the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Recently, IRC alumnus Peter Markowitz ’01 launched an immigrants’ rights clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Isaac Wheeler ’03, today a staff attorney at the Bronx Defenders, spoke for his fellow celebrants in explaining Morawetz’s continuing influence. “Whenever I think, there’s no way, no chance for this case, I hear Nancy’s voice saying, ‘Oh, you can do this!’” said Wheeler. “I am forever warped,” he added. “So thanks, Nancy.”

Rachel Rosenbloom ’02 spoke of doubt on first exposure to Morawetz’s fierce view that young lawyers have a responsibility to accept the growing needs of immigrants, especially in a post-9/11 climate hostile to them. “In class, I would secretly wonder—is she crazy?” said Rosenbloom, a former supervising attorney at the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College. “But I’ve learned that being a graduate of Professor Morawetz’s clinic means that in the world of criminal deportation, doors open anywhere in the world.”

Enthusiasm for the clinic is perhaps best demonstrated by Alina Das ’05, an IRC alumna who became Morawetz’s coteacher in 2008. “I remember thinking after my year as a clinic student, wouldn’t it be great to do this forever?” said Das. “So, it’s been great getting a job here.” Mayra Peters-Quintero ’99, now a program director of migrant and immigrant rights at the Ford Foundation and Morawetz’s former co-teacher from 2004 to 2008, graduated the spring before the clinic was begun.

Morawetz spoke of the clinic’s ongoing efforts in navigating what she terms the “horrible process” of alien detainment and deportation hearings in accordance with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Luis Gutierrez, blindsided by an especially draconian application of that 1996 federal statute, was represented by clinic students in his long struggle for habeas corpus relief after being deported to his native Colombia—a struggle that included being “ripped off,” as he put it, by an ineffective private attorney. Gutierrez, one of a few former clients invited to the reunion, offered his thanks to the dozens of students who helped him from 2000 to 2007, when he returned to the United States as a free man. “I had lost all hope of justice,” said Gutierrez, now working as an electrician in Jersey City and reunited with his American-born daughter. “But then I found this clinic.”

Morawetz, admitting inability to imagine an eight-year separation from her own two children, said of the Gutierrez case, “He suffered terribly. His marriage was destroyed. You can’t make somebody whole again. All that pain and anguish, yet he’s the happy story.”

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Boies recalled the infamous Supreme Court case, which he argued on Al Gore’s behalf in 2000, at a roundtable last spring hosted by Dean Richard Revesz. “Every lawyer is used to losing cases, but it’s tough when you lose the whole country,” Boies said, calling the defeat “particularly frustrating and disappointing” because the Florida courts had been receptive to Gore’s arguments. Boies described those tense post-election days for a rapt audience of students. While the Court stipulated that its decision should not be used as precedent, Boies likened the case to a landmine: “People sometimes even forget it’s there, but in the right circumstances it can blow something up.” He predicted we may not have heard the last of Bush v. Gore. “It could come back to haunt some of the ideological conservatives who thought it was a good idea at the time.”

Boies is no stranger to politics. He served as chief counsel and staff director to both the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and Judiciary Committee in the 1970s, and as counsel to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the 1990s. In 1997, he won the closely watched United States v. Microsoft antitrust case as the Justice Department’s special trial counsel.

That high-profile case undoubtedly helped to fuel the extraordinary growth of Boies’s three-lawyer boutique into a 240-attorney behemoth. Despite its size, Boies still believes that less is more. “Size is really an enemy,” he said. “But it’s a necessary evil because if you’re not growing, you’re not going to be able to continue to have the very best lawyers, and having the very best lawyers is the way you keep the very best clients.”

Boies, who suffers from dyslexia, does not use notes when arguing in court, but can still cite cases from memory, down to the page number. And despite being a formidable trial lawyer, he confessed that he had his heart set on teaching; he was an adjunct professor at NYU Law for six years. “I enjoy the law,” he said. “There’s almost no aspect of it that I don’t enjoy.”

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But Seth Glickenhaus ’38 has a single, searing memory: When he was a 16-year-old freshman at Harvard College in 1930, Glickenhaus was surprised to arrive home to find his father, Morris, downcast. An insurance broker, his father had just fired a longtime employee. “He’ll get another job, won’t he?” Glickenhaus said. His father, not a man given to emotion, wept.

Now 95, Glickenhaus has been besieged by business reporters seeking the perspective of someone who worked on Wall Street during the Great Depression. They want his insight into the economic crisis and are frankly astonished that someone of his years is still working. Glickenhaus sets aside weekdays at 4:15, after the market closes, just for media interviews.

When Glickenhaus sat down to talk in his midtown Manhattan office on an overcast day last November, the market, after weeks of free fall, was up. He wore a brown sweater, gray pants, and eyeglasses the size of oranges. His thin white hair was swept back on his head. Though he walked slowly, in tiny steps, his voice was strong, his hearing good, and his opinions tart.

When investment bankers today take tens of millions of dollars in fees, “that, to me, is Al Capone with a high hat,” said Glickenhaus, senior partner and chief investment officer of Glickenhaus & Co. Just as bad in its way is the business press, he said. “The media has so emphasized the negative, that the market has made a low that will stand for some time even though we are in for only a year or two of recession.” The country has deeper problems than it had during the Depression, he acknowledged. But unlike that time, when government failed to act quickly, Glickenhaus said, “governments—both ours and in Europe and in Asia—are throwing so many trillions at the problem that the recession will not be very deep or very long.”

He singles out one Wall Street player for criticism: the credit-rating agencies, like Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s. Analysts say their sunny ratings of mortgage securities helped lead to billions of dollars in losses. But Glickenhaus thinks the agencies will never get it right. They “look at the past and the present, without making a real effort to look into the future because that’s more subjective.” He frowned. “So the day after a triple-A bond defaults, they downgrade it!” he said, laughing.

Glickenhaus’s skepticism toward Wall Street began in the summer of 1929 when he worked as a teenage errands “runner” for Salomon Brothers & Hutzler (now Salomon Brothers, part of Citigroup). He was chided by his boss for doing his job too quickly as longer tasks paid better. “The word was ‘stall,’” he said. “You were supposed to take twice as long. You could get a cup of coffee, you could get your shoes shined. I was appalled.”

Nonetheless, after Harvard, where he concentrated in economics because of the stock market crash, he got a job as a bond trader at Salomon in 1934. In the days before computers, bonds were an arcane market. “If you had a good memory” for bond yields and financial minutiae, he said, “you could make a good living.”

But he wasn’t making a good living: He earned only $48 a week, a small sum even then. He had decided to hedge his career bets by going to the NYU School of Law at night, graduating in 1938. That year, however, he and a friend, Lawrence Lembo, founded their own small securities firm, Glickenhaus & Lembo. And he never looked back. He worked at the firm until World War II intervened. “As an American and a Jew, I felt I owed it to myself to shoot Nazis.”

Alas, it was not to be. Despite being assigned to what became the legendary 10th Mountain Division, the Army’s white-clad ski soldiers, he spent much of the war training other troops and learning a foreign language. Still, he gained a wife, having met a pretty speech therapist, Sarah Brody, while studying Norwegian at the University of Minnesota.

He returned to Wall Street and struck it rich after a lucrative bond deal in 1959. He and Lembo retired. He was in his 40s, however. So, in a midlife crisis, Glickenhaus decided on his version of a cherry-red Corvette: He wanted to become a doctor. After brushing up on sciences at Columbia, he was admitted to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, but reconsidered matriculating when he realized the toll years more of training would take on his marriage and his then-teenage children, Jimmy and Nancy.

Today, Glickenhaus & Co., founded in 1961, is small by Wall Street standards, managing $1 billion for high-net-worth clients. Glickenhaus is one of only five senior managers making investment decisions.

He snorts at the inevitable question of the secret to long life: “The right genes and a wife who makes sure you live sensibly.” He exercises regularly, sleeps nine or more hours a night, and eats a Mediterranean diet.

Any parting advice? Don’t follow icons, he said. “If Warren Buffet is doing something, people want to do it,” he said. “Think for yourself, or else the world will really foul you up!”

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Radhakrishnan, now 31, arrived in India at a crucial time for its pharmaceutical industry. Upon joining the World Trade Organization in 1995, India was required to enact patent legislation by 2005. Patents offer pharmaceutical companies a 20-year period of exclusivity to manufacture and sell their inventions. But too often, Radhakrishnan argues, the companies make only minor changes to drugs whose patents are about to expire, then apply for patents to essentially extend their monopoly for another 20 years. “They’re gaming the system,” she said, causing profound hardship on the poor in developing nations where generics are the only affordable drugs. WHO predicts that 10 million lives could be saved yearly with more access to medicines. “That’s the injustice that drives me,” she added.

In May 2006, Radhakrishnan, along with her husband, Tahir Amin, 37, an intellectual property soliciter, launched I-MAK (Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge) to take on pharmaceutical companies. “We’re not anti-patent, we’re anti-undeserved patents,” said Radhakrishnan. Doing much of their work in Internet cafes and on airplanes as they fly from one developing nation to another, the two rely on a small team of scientists and lawyers to selectively review and expose unmerited patents. Arguing on the basis of scientific validity, such as newness, usefulness, and inventiveness, I-MAK has challenged patents dozens of times and has won at least two battles.

In June 2008 after an I-MAK challenge, the Indian Patent Office denied Boehringer Ingelheim’s patent application on a syrup version of a pediatric anti-HIV drug that already existed in tablet form. In 2007, Glaxo- SmithKline withdrew a patent application and cut the price of an adult anti-HIV drug a year after I-MAK prepared a challenge. “Until we intervene, and impoverished patients take on the additional burden of filing legal cases, these companies don’t seem to care about access,” said Radhakrishnan.

The pharmaceuticals see it differently. “Incremental improvements are not desperate moves to extend patent life,” says Ken Johnson, senior vice president of PhRMA, a membership organization that includes the leading pharmaceutical companies. He argues that, for example, creating a shelf-stable form of a drug that otherwise would require refrigeration, which is largely unavailable to the world’s poor, is a significant advance.

In 2008, Radhakrishnan and Amin won a $90,000 fellowship from Echoing Green, which invests in and supports budding social entrepreneurs. Radhakrishnan also was awarded a Social Innovation Fellowship by Pop! Tech. Gregg Gonsalves, a patients’ rights advocate, said, “She’s part of a small corps of people worldwide that have used legal strategies to expand access to lifesaving drugs to millions of people. There are not many lawyers of her generation who have made such an impact.”

Radhakrishnan grew up in Fremont, California. She traces her passion for science to her father, an Indian immigrant who completed his postdoctorate work in pharmaceutical science at MIT and has worked at Bay Area drug companies for the past 25 years. She recalls spending early childhood dinners listening to her dad and 1968 Nobel Laureate H. Gobind Khorana “fiercely discussing scientific theories and breakthroughs.” While her friends decorated their rooms with posters of teen heartthrobs, she had a huge laminated periodic table of elements—a gift from dad.

Radhakrishnan got involved in social activism, raising awareness about domestic violence, at the University of California, Berkeley. Graduating in 1999 with a B.A. in political science and international relations, she entered NYU Law. “At orientation, the dean told us that we were a family. I don’t think I realized that this incredibly supportive community would actually end up changing my life,” she said. One course that made a deep impression was Professor Holly Maguigan’s seminar, Comparative Criminal Justice—Focus on Domestic Violence. “She was truly engaged and a wonderfully iconoclastic thinker,” said Maguigan. Once, she walked into class wearing gigantic overalls, Maguigan recalled. The slight and soft-spoken Radhakrishnan explained that how you dress affects how you sit and ultimately how you would conduct yourself in the classroom.

Over the next three years, Radhakrishnan and Amin, based in New York City’s Upper West Side, plan to build a free online database that will track pending patents on drugs for the most common diseases in the developing world such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and malaria. Since that information is usually costly, “we are leveling the playing field for patients and the public by making the system more transparent,” she said. They will also take time out for Salsa and Samba lessons. Doing increasingly more work in Latin America, they’re often taken to dance clubs. “We felt like we had two left feet,” says Tahir. “We want to get this right, so we’ve chalked it up on our board as a must-do.”

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