BIOGHIST REQUIRED Wilfred Feinberg was born on June 22, 1920 in New York City. His family soon moved to Mount Vernon, NY, where he has remained for much of his life. After graduating from high school, Feinberg attended Columbia College (class of 1940) and enrolled in Columbia Law School before enlisting in the Army during World War II.
During his three years of service in the Signal Corps, Feinberg wrote for Yank magazine and a Signal Corps newsletter, and later wrote a (never published) novel based on his wartime experiences. He reenrolled at Columbia Law School after his Army service and served as editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review . Upon graduation in 1946, Feinberg married Shirley Marcus and moved to Philadelphia to clerk for District Judge James P. McGranery, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
In 1949, after his clerkship, Feinberg returned with his family to New York and joined the firm Kaye Scholer as an associate. After four years, he was offered a junior partner position at McGoldrick, Dannett, Horowitz and Golub, a smaller firm with Columbia Law School connections. Feinberg and his wife became involved in Westchester Democratic politics, leading to his 1958 appointment by Governor W. Averell Harriman as Deputy Superintendent of Banks. As Deputy Superintendent, Feinberg was responsible for regulating union welfare and retail installment credit. After Harriman was defeated by Nelson Rockefeller, Feinberg returned to private practice at McGoldrick, where he remained until his appointment as District Judge in 1961.
In October 1961, Feinberg received a recess appointment from President Kennedy to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He was officially confirmed in March 1962. One of Feinberg's first experiences on the bench was with the electrical equipment antitrust cases, which were thousands of private suits that were filed after a 1961 grand jury indictment in Philadelphia against equipment manufacturers for price-fixing. The Co-Ordinating Committee for Multiple Litigation, formed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, was formed to unify the pre-trial process and SDNY Chief Judge Sylvester Ryan was appointed to the committee. Ryan, in turn, asked Feinberg to attend the meetings as his proxy, and Feinberg became deeply involved in the procedural aspects of multidistrict litigation.
His work on judicial procedural improvements continued when Chief Justice Warren appointed him to the Advisory Committee on Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1965. It was Feinberg's first official involvement in judicial administration, and throughout his career he remained active in issues of judicial administration and procedure, most notably on the Advisory Council for Appellate Justice (1970-1975) and the Long Range Planning Committee (1991-1995), both under the aegis of the Judicial Conference of the United States.
In 1966, President Johnson nominated Feinberg to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and he became one of the youngest judges on the Court of Appeals. As junior judge, Feinberg was responsible for many of the administrative tasks that would become the job of the Circuit Executive upon the position's creation in 1971. He remained interested in court administration, and wrote numerous articles and speeches on the subject.
Feinberg was Chief Judge of the Second Circuit from 1980 through 1988. He assumed senior status in 1991 but remained active on the bench and on a number of judicial committees until his retirement in 2011. In his career on the bench, Feinberg wrote over 1000 opinions. Citations for some of the historically and legally important cases can be found in the notes to Subseries II.2 and Subseries III.2, along with very brief summaries.
Feinberg was an active presence in the Alumni Associations of both Columbia College and Columbia Law School, and includes among his former clerks countless Columbia Law School alumni, including Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. Judge Feinberg retired from the bench in 2011 after fifty years of service. He lives with Shirley in Mount Vernon, New York.
Sources:
Federal Judicial Center, History of the Federal Judiciary. "Wilfred Feinberg." Biographical Directory of Federal Judges.
Interviews of Wilfred Feinberg by Jeffrey Morris, 1996-1997.
Rosenberg, Maurice. "Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg: A Twenty-Fifth Year Tribute. Columbia Law Review 86 (1986): 1505-1514.
From the guide to the Wilfred Feinberg Papers, 1936-2011, [Bulk Dates: 1960-2011]., (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
