If there is one thing that
living in a market economy teaches us, it's that there is no such thing as a
complete disaster. I always marvel when someone says-- with surprise-- that
"like a phoenix from the ashes", they managed to come out of a bad
situation and did OK.
Because the phoenix is the ashes.
There are plenty of people who understand this. Lee Kreindler, for instance.
He managed to make a living, start an industry, shape international law, and
help thousands of people get recompense for their unwelcomed horror.
The phoenix is the ashes.
Lee
Kreindler, 78, Air-Crash Lawyer, Dies
By ADAM LIPTAK
Lee S. Kreindler,
who is considered the founder of air disaster law, and whose law firm, Kreindler
& Kreindler, represented plaintiffs
in almost every major aircraft disaster in
the last half-century, died yesterday at New
York University Hospital in Manhattan. He was 78.
The cause was complications
of a cerebral
hemorrhage, his family
announced.
In 1989, The National Law Journal asked lawyers
in the aviation field whom they would hire
if a family member died in a plane crash. About 20 lawyers and firms were mentioned
in all, but the newspaper noted that Mr. Kreindler, "the
grandfather of the field," was at the top of nearly everyone's list.
"You name them,"
Mr. Kreindler said of the big air disaster cases of the last 50 years, "we
were in them."
He played leading roles in the lawsuits after the crash of Trans
World Airlines Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996, the bombing of Pan
American Flight 103 over Lockerbie,
Scotland, in 1988, and scores
of others.
Aviation law is a complex specialty
that involves traditional wrongful death
and personal
injury doctrines, international
treaties and difficult jurisdictional
questions. The factual issues are almost always equally complex. Discovering
the causes of disasters requires knowledge of aeronautical
engineering, aircraft
and airline operations, weather
and, sometimes, airport
security.
Mr. Kreindler was adept at boiling
a mass of both legal and
factual issues down to their essences.
Domestically, he contended with stringent limitations on airline
liability and on where damage
suits could be filed. His arguments helped persuade courts to ease these limits.
But it was in international law that Mr. Kreindler faced what he called "horrendous"
challenges, and he waged a 50-year battle against treaty limitations on recovery
in cases arising from international travel.
Under the 1929
Warsaw Convention, obtaining any recovery above a small amount required
proof of willful misconduct on the part of the carrier. It also limited the
places in which plaintiffs could sue.
"For years," he wrote in The New York Law Journal in 1999, "willful
misconduct was almost impossible to prove, but in the 1980's and 1990's, juries,
mindful of the awful
consequences of their failure to find it, began returning verdicts for the plaintiffs."
The enormous technical sophistication
Mr. Kreindler and his firm developed played a role as well. That sophistication
may explain why a relatively small number of law firms undertook air disaster
work.
His father, Harry E. Kreindler, was the other
Kreindler in the firm's name. Today, the younger Mr. Kreindler's son, James
P., is also a partner there.
He is also survived by his wife, Ruth, a daughter, Laurie Laster, and seven
grandchildren, as well as a sister, Rosamond Koffman.
Lee Kreindler's father gave him advice on his first air disaster case, arising
from the 1952 crash of a National Airlines DC-6
in Elizabeth, N.J., according to the Harvard
Law School's alumni
magazine.
Observing his obsessive work on the
case, his father said, "No case will ever reward the kind of effort you're
putting into this one."
Among other things, he went to work in a maintenance shop to educate himself
on the plane's design. He came up with a theory
of the failure of one of the four propellers that eventually persuaded a jury
to award his client $300,000, then the highest award in an air crash suit.
The younger Mr. Kreindler went on to write a three-volume treatise, "Aviation
Accident
Law" (Matthew
Bender 1971), and frequent articles explaining developments in the area.
He was active in trial lawyers' organizations and served as the chairman of
several committees devoted to aviation law.
He graduated from Dartmouth
College and Harvard Law School and served in the Army in World War II.
Fifty years after the Elizabeth disaster and two weeks
before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Kreindler took
stock of airline and airport security in a New York Law Journal column following
precautions instituted in the wake of the Lockerbie bombing, primarily involving
barring unaccompanied baggage.
"One
must conclude," he wrote, "that terrorist incidents will be fewer
and will be far less likely to succeed than before Lockerbie."
He was an early advocate of the theory that T.W.A.
Flight 800, which exploded and crashed into the ocean off Long Island in
1996, was brought down by mechanical failure. Mr. Kreindler represented the
families of more than 50 of those who died in the crash.
He explained the differences
between the two disasters to his law school's alumni magazine.
"The Lockerbie bomb brought Pan Am 103 down because it exploded at 32,000
feet in high winds," he sad. "It punched a small hole in the fuselage,
and that permitted the winds to tear the structure apart. T.W.A. 800 exploded
at 13,700
feet in calm weather. It would have taken a huge bomb to bring that plane
down, and the larger the bomb, the more difficult it is to smuggle onto a plane."
In 1996, not long after Congress enacted antiterrorism legislation allowing
suits against nations that sponsor terrorism, he sued the government of Libya
for its involvement in the Lockerbie crash. Libya recently offered to settle
the case and other claims for $2.7 billion. The proposed settlement has been
delayed by wrangling over how much responsibility
Libya will acknowledge.
Mr. Kreindler and his firm also represented
the families of many victims of the 9/11 attacks. He was a critic of the compensation
fund created by Congress and of Kenneth R. Feinberg, the fund's special master.
In an article in The New York Law Journal in January 2002, he cautioned Mr.
Feinberg, based on his experiences, about "the rage
that disaster victims feel when they think they are not being treated fairly."
Mr. Kreindler flew a great deal, and it bothered him not at all.
"I'm a very relaxed passenger," he said. "It's extremely safe.
An accident only happens when there is an extraordinary
coincidence of a number of things going wrong."
Copyright 2003 New York Times (Registration required)
8:31:50 PM 
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