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Pro Bono
New York City Pro Bono Training Calendar
New York State Pro Bono Opportunities Guide
Accolades
New York Lawyer
October 16, 2006
By Thomas Adcock
New York Law Journal
For its 8,000 hours of volunteer work on behalf of victims of Hurricane Katrina, a team of 20 attorneys and paralegals at Schulte, Roth & Zabel was honored by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty during a dinner awards program last week at the Hotel Monaco in Washington, D.C.
Partner Howard Godnick and special counsel Daniel L. Greenberg led the Schulte Roth team to success with the class action McWaters v. FEMA in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. The suit alleged inadequacies by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that adversely affected some 150,000 people made homeless by the August 2005 hurricane.
In McWaters, the Schulte Roth lawyers partnered with the National Law Center as well as the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C., the California-based Public Interest Law Project and Louisiana solo practitioner John Pierre.
Earlier this year, Schulte Roth received the Pro Bono Publico Award of the Louisiana State Bar Association. The award had never before been given to a firm outside Louisiana.
New York's Center for Constitutional Rights and its client Maher Arar were given international human rights awards by the Institute for Policy Studies during a recent ceremony at institute headquarters in Washington, D.C., presided over by the British actress and political activist Vanessa Redgrave.
Mr. Arar is the Ottawa engineer detained by the United States in 2002 at John F. Kennedy International Airport and sent under "extraordinary rendition" authority to officials in Syria renowned for torture.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police recently apologized to Mr. Arar for passing information to U.S. intelligence personnel that erroneously accused him of terrorist connections. At the same time, a Canadian government commission certified that Mr. Arar had indeed been tortured for months in Syria. Mr. Arar accepted his award by video because he is still barred from entering the United States.
The awards were presented by Ms. Redgrave on Sept. 21, marking the 30th anniversary of a 1976 car bombing outside institute offices that killed Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, an outspoken critic of his country's military dictatorship at the time, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a U.S. citizen and institute fundraiser. The award was given in memory of Mr. Letelier and Ms. Moffitt.
In addition to its work on the Arar case, the Center for Constitutional Rights was honored for the entirety of its 40-year crusade against torture and other human rights abuses. The center's lawyers won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2004 allowing detainees held at the U.S. Naval prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their imprisonment.
For the body of their public interest and philanthropic work, Abby S. Milstein and Howard Milstein are to be honored at the annual Louis Marshall Dinner on Nov. 1, sponsored by The Jewish Theological Seminary.
The dinner honors the memory of the Louis B. Marshall (1856-1929) and those who exemplify his life as a penniless immigrant who became a corporate and constitutional lawyer in New York and who worked to secure religious, political and cultural freedoms for minority groups.
Ms. Milstein, a partner at Constantine Cannon, is president of the New York Legal Assistance Group and was former chairwoman of the Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar of the New York City Bar Association.
Mr. Milstein, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, is CEO of Emigrant Bank and managing partner of Milstein Properties.
At its annual "Fruits of Our Labor" dinner last month, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York honored a team of lawyers from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison for their pro bono work on behalf of union employees.
In the past year, the Paul Weiss team has represented workers at Redeye Grill, Daniel, Trattoria Del'Arte and Brooklyn Diner USA in a variety of litigation matters. The team includes partner M. Christopher Boehning, counsel Jonathan H. Hurwitz, and associates Melissa L. Chua, Jennifer A. Hurley, Daniel S. Kirschbaum, Henry Seiji Newman, Kerry L. Quinn, Joanna L.W. Trachtenberg and Ayanna Williams.
Three attorneys at Chadbourne & Parke, along with three Chadbourne alumni, were honored last month for their pro bono work for Housing Conservation Coordinators during the organization's first annual "Volunteer and Leadership Awards Reception."
Honored were Chadbourne attorneys Dennis C. Hopkins, Marjory T. Herold and Julia Rubin, as well as alumni Sola B. Oyebolu, William F. Hennessey II and Alan I. Ellman.
Housing Conservation Coordinators provides legal counsel in Housing Court, as well as tenant organization.
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