Victor Schwartz Lecture

We Used It When We Had It: The Alien Tort Claims Act in Successful Litigation Against 26 Banks for Holocaust-Era Theft in Vichy France,”
Professor Emeritus Richard H. Weisberg Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

About the Lecture
The story of the paper trail of “Jewish money” stolen by various European institutions during the Holocaust is a complicated and still incomplete narrative. This lecture speaks to the way that U.S. federal courts assisted in both bringing a firmer factual base to historians and a measure of justice to those victimized by property theft during the Second World War.

During WWII, commercial banks operating under the antisemitic Vichy regime in France confiscated the assets of those depositors recognized as Jews under Vichy law. After the war, many efforts to recover these seized funds (from banks both in France and many other European nations) foundered due to what the banks characterized as a lack of adequate records—essentially once again victimizing the depositors, whose papers had been confiscated and often destroyed by the Nazis and their collaborators.

Beginning in the 1990s, however, a new wave of class action litigation against European institutions successfully broke the logjam. Benisti v. Banque Paribas, for example, was a class action filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York under the Alien Tort Claims Act, naming 26 banks, including two American and one British bank, as defendants. Rejecting the arguments the banks had previously relied on to avoid liability, the district court ruled in 2000 that the case could go forward. The ruling prompted a series of settlements that resulted in the payment of millions of dollars in compensation to claimants whose deposits had been confiscated.

The successful plaintiffs in Benisti and other Holocaust tort cases relied in part on Professor Weisberg’s 1996 book, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, which included a “smoking gun” in the form of documentation from the archives regarding the non-French banking defendants. In this year’s Victor E. Schwartz Lecture in Torts, Professor Weisberg, who was of counsel to the plaintiffs throughout the litigation and until the ultimate settlement in the State Department offices during the waning days of the Clinton Administration, will comment on Benisti and other litigation arising out of the Holocaust. The lecture will explain why more recent changes in the law have made it far less likely that Holocaust victims and their heirs could successfully bring federal court actions against private or governmental entities today.

About the Lecturer
Richard H. Weisberg is a Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at Benjamin N. Cardoza School of Law. He was an Obama appointee to the Commission on the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. Professor Weisberg has helped litigate successfully in American federal courts on behalf of Holocaust survivors and their heirs, providing a measure of justice for World War II victims of anti-Semitism.

President Nicholas Sarkozy of France awarded him the Legion of Honor in 2008. The founding director at Cardozo of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program and the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy, he writes widely in those areas, including his book Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France and essays on First Amendment developments in the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a pioneer in the growing law and literature movement worldwide, and his books The Failure of the Word and Poethics have been widely translated. In 2014, he published In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility (Oxford University Press). The book argues that a willingness to embrace intransigence allows us to recognize the value of our beliefs, which are always at risk of being compromised or equivocated. He has visited many undergraduate institutions in the U.S., at law schools around the country, and in France, Denmark and China, where he is an honorary professor of law at Wuhan University.

His staging of legal dilemmas in great fictional works has won notices from The New York Times, the National Law Journal, and The New Yorker magazine. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of Rockefeller Foundation, NEH and ACLS grants. He holds a B.A. from Brandeis University, and his Ph.D. from Cornell is in French and comparative literature. While teaching those subjects on the graduate faculty of the University of Chicago, Professor Weisberg earned his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was an editor of the Columbia Law Review. He has been associated with the firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York and Coudert Freres in Paris.

CLE: 1 hour of general CLE has been approved for OH and KY.