ABSTRACT
This Article celebrates Professor Aaron Twerski’s ‘practical wisdom’ in crafting a solution (with Jim Henderson) to a problem faced by Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the 9/11 First Responder cases. The problem was that Congress did not include these plaintiffs within the Victims Compensation Fund (‘VCF’) despite there being every reason to suspect that the interaction of workers’ compensation law and tort law, if left to operate on their own, would generate a politically unacceptable outcome. Despite his clear misgivings – expressed decades earlier – about allowing those who control the workplace to enjoy the benefits of limited liability guaranteed by workers’ compensation while shifting the cost of their own carelessness onto third parties, Professor Twerski devised a settlement that, in effect, did exactly that. This Article explains how the settlement achieved a certain degree of justice by permitting prudence to prevail over principle.
Sebok, Anthony J, Aaron Twerski: Practical Wisdom at Ground Zero (March 1, 2024), 18 Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial and Commercial Law 141 (2023); Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming.
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