Law Professors
Arthur Miller to Head Milberg’s Appellate Practice
Posted Oct 23, 2008, 06:15 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Famous law professor Arthur Miller will head the appellate practice at the securities class action firm that survived allegations it participated in a scheme to pay kickbacks to lead plaintiffs.
Miller will be of counsel at the Milberg firm while keeping his position as a law professor at New York University, the New York Law Journal reports.
In June, the law firm agreed to pay $75 million in exchange for dropped charges. A federal monitor is overseeing its operations. Firm founder Melvyn Weiss pleaded guilty in the kickback scheme and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Miller was among those who requested a lenient sentence for Weiss.
In an interview with the Am Law Daily, Miller said he met Weiss years ago during a legal seminar and they became good friends. He has worked on appeals for the law firm, but said he finally decided to join Milberg because of the economic meltdown.
“[My sense is that] a lot of misconduct has been going on in the financial community for some time,” he said. “If I really do care about what the Yalies would call distributive justice, [Milberg] is a good place to be—to try and see if there's some way to rectify [corporate wrongdoing] through compensation or through procedural reforms and oversight and new forms of regulation. This a firm on the cutting edge of that.”
Miller said the criminal probe was a consideration, but “I'm too dumb to be scared off. As I said, the past is the past. And forgive me, I'm naive I suppose, but I don't believe in guilt by association. As a couple of courts have recognized, there is no one here affiliated with that past.”
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