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Bernard W. Nussbaum (born March 23, 1937) is an American attorney, best known for having served as White House Counsel under President Bill Clinton. ==Background and career== Nussbaum, the first child of jewish immigrants from Poland, was born in New York City. His father and mother originally worked in garment factories and his father was later employed by the garment workers union, the ILGWU. Nussbaum grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, which at the time was home to many immigrant families from Eastern Europe. He was educated in the New York City public schools. In 1954 he graduated from Stuyvesant High School, a specialized high school in New York City which requires the passing of an entrance exam for admission. He went to Columbia College in New York as a scholarship student, receiving scholarships from New York State and Columbia which enabled him to attend. He joined the staff of the college daily newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator and, in his senior year, he became the Editor-in-Chief of the Spectator. He was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. During the summer months, to help pay for his education, he worked as a waiter at hotels in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania and the Catskill Mountains in New York. In 1958 Nussbaum graduated from Columbia and enrolled at Harvard Law School. After his first year, on the basis of his grades, he was selected to join the Harvard Law Review and given a full tuition scholarship by the law school. In his final year he became Note Editor of the Law Review, succeeding Antonin Scalia, now a Supreme Court Justice. Upon completing law school in 1961, Nussbaum was awarded a Harvard University Sheldon Traveling Fellowship enabling him to travel around the world for a year visiting over 30 countries. On his return he served for six months on active duty in the United States Army and was a member of the Army Reserves for six years. In 1962 he was sworn in as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, in the office led by Robert Morgenthau. He was a federal prosecutor for over three years and tried a number of major criminal cases. These cases included convicting, after a four month trial, five officials of a federal savings and loan association of perjury designed to cover up the diversion of over $250,000 from the association to support a political campaign being conducted by the president of the association. He also won a jury verdict convicting a prominent accountant and investor of bribing and conspiring (with other major investors) to bribe an internal revenue agent. Following his service as a federal prosecutor, Nussbaum, in 1968, ran for a seat in the New York State Assembly. In a close contest, in a Democratic primary election in Brooklyn, New York, he lost to the incumbent assemblyman. In 1970 Nussbaum managed Robert Morgenthau's campaign for Governor of the State of New York. He led a group of former Assistant United States Attorneys in conducting a state-wide petition drive to place Morgenthau's name on the Democratic Party primary ballot for the party's nomination for Governor, opposing Arthur Goldberg, the former Supreme Court Justice, who was the choice of the Democratic Party leaders. In a short period of time well over 15,000 signatures of registered Democrats were collected in over 50 New York counties, with the requirement that there be at least 100 such valid signatures in each county. Many of the upstate counties in New York have few residents and even fewer registered democrats. This made the petition drive difficult. The petition drive, however, succeeded and Morgenthau commenced his race against Goldberg. A third political party, the Liberal Party, then decided to give its nomination to Goldberg. This decision (which had the effect of splitting the vote against the incumbent Governor if Morgenthau won the Democratic primary) made it virtually impossible for Morgenthau to defeat the incumbent Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, in the general election. Morgenthau therefore withdrew from the primary race against Goldberg. Goldberg ran as the Democratic/Liberal candidate again Rockefeller in the general election and was defeated. In 1966 Nussbaum joined the New York law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one year after the firm was founded by Martin Lipton, Herbert Wachtell, Leonard Rosen and George Katz, four lawyers in their early 30s who in time became among the most prominent lawyers of their generation. The firm at the time had less than 10 lawyers. Today it has more than 250 lawyers and is one of the most preeminent corporate law firms in the United States. After over four decades as a partner, Nussbaum is presently Of Counsel to the Wachtell, Lipton firm. He specializes in corporate and securities litigation. While in private practice he also served as a member of the adjunct faculty of Columbia Law School, conducting a seminar in trial practice for third year law students. As a senior litigation partner at the Wachtell, Lipton law firm, Nussbaum represented a wide range of clients including major corporate entities, law firms, law firm partners, government officials, political figures and the judiciary. Working together with his firm's partners and associates, Nussbaum was the lead trial lawyer in numerous cases tried in various state and federal courts around the country, most notably a number of significant corporate cases won by his firm. These include representing United Technologies in defeating a suit brought by the United States Department of Justice in a New York federal court seeking to prevent United from acquiring the Carrier Corporation. United was able to successfully acquire Carrier. He represented Hilton Corporation in a Nevada federal court and obtained an injunction preventing ITT Corporation from blocking a takeover effort. He won a judgment in Delaware Chancery Court on behalf of IBP Corporation ordering Tyson Foods to consummate a multi-billion merger between IBP and Tyson, which Tyson agreed to but was seeking to avoid. Representing Multimedia,Inc., a large communication company located in Greenville, South Carolina, he defeated, in a South Carolina state court, an effort by Jack Kent Cooke to force Multimedia to accept his hostile bid to take control of the company. Cooke sought an injunction to block a recapitalization of the company and, instead, require Multimedia to accept his bid. That effort was rejected by the Court and Cooke withdrew his bid. In 2004 he won a jury verdict in a New York federal court on behalf of the developer of the World Trade Center against a number of insurance companies. After a trial lasting more than a month, the jury found that what occurred on September 11, 2001 at the Trade Center was, under the terms of the insurance agreements then in force, two separate events. This significantly increased the amount of insurance due and resulted in a multi-billion payment to the developer for the rebuilding of the Center. In the course of his career, Nussbaum was asked to represent a number of major law firms (including Sullivan and Cromwell and Shearman and Sterling) in law suits brought against them or certain of their partners. These suits were resolved in favor of his law firm clients. He represented a senior partner of the Simpson Thacher law firm who was charged with diverting fees owing to the firm. His client ultimately pleaded guilty and cooperated with law enforcement authorities. After lower court hearings and an appeal, a prison term which had been imposed was set aside and his client was not required to serve any time in prison. In a case which generated one of the most prominent legal ethics controversies of the decade, Nussbaum represented the leading New York law firm Kaye Scholer. The Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency of the federal government, sued Kaye Scholer charging it with improperly withholding damaging information about its client, a large savings and loan association whose failure epitomized the savings and loan industry disaster in the early 1990's. The law firm vehemently denied it did anything wrong in representing its client; it maintained that it had an obligation to represent its client zealously and not to disclose information which would hurt the client. At the outset of the lawsuit the government froze all the assets of Kaye Scholer. This freeze rapidly put the firm perilously close to collapse. It made it virtually impossible to contest the government's action as the firm might not survive in the interim. At this point Nussbaum was retained to represent the Kaye Scholer firm. In less than a week a settlement was reached which did not require any admission of wrongdoing by the firm and provided for a payment over time, much of which was covered by insurance. This enabled the firm to continue as a respected and successful law firm. In the mid-1970s, during New York City's fiscal crises, Nussbaum and his firm represented the Comptroller of the City of New York. At the time the Comptroller, along with the Mayor and the City, were the subject of an investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission into whether there was fraud in the sale of City securities. After a lengthy inquiry, during which numerous documents were produced and top city officials were required to testify, there was no finding of any wrongdoing. Recently, because judicial salaries in New York had been frozen for more than a decade (the legislature refused to raise judicial salaries unless its salaries were also raised), Nussbaum represented the Chief Judge of the State of New York and the Judiciary of the State, without fee, in successful constitutional litigation ultimately decided by the state's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals ruled that holding judicial salaries hostage to legislative salaries was unconstitutional. As a consequence, the Legislature and the Governor agreed to change the system for determining the compensation of judges. Decisions regarding judicial salaries are now made every four years by an independent commission rather than by the executive and legislative branches. In August 2011 the first commission appointed raised the salaries of New York state judges (then $136,700 for trial judges) to the level of federal district judges (then $174,000), the increase to be phased in over a two and a half year period beginning in April 2012. Another commission has recently been appointed to review judicial salaries for the next four years. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bernard W. Nussbaum」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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