The charges against Yonkers were brought in a lawsuit that the Justice Department filed in 1980 in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The case was assigned to Judge Sand, who had joined the court two years earlier.... Some applauded him as rightly following precedents when, in 1986, he ordered that the city remedy the housing portion of its violations by adopting a plan for building up to 1,000 units of low- and moderate-income housing in predominantly white neighborhoods.I clerked for Judge Sand from the fall of 1981 to the summer of 1982 — the between-pregnancies period of my life. He embodied the qualities you imagine when you think about the ideal judge. It was wonderful to go from law school to the experience of watching him manage the day to day ordeals of the lawyers and clients of the Southern District of New York.
They praised him again when he imposed potentially bankrupting fines on Yonkers to overcome its City Council’s repeated defiance of his mandated remedy.... Critics, however, viewed him as engaging in “social engineering,” and some called him a “judicial tyrant.” Yonkers officials, who denied they were responsible for the segregation, denounced the judge, as did many white residents, some of whom picketed his weekend home in northern Westchester County....
Other widely noted decisions by Judge Sand included a 1990 ruling that overturned a ban on panhandling in the New York City subway system. It was the first time a federal court found that panhandling was a free-speech right protected by the First Amendment....
Perhaps Judge Sand’s most prominent criminal trial was that in 2001 of four terrorists who were convicted of conspiring in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa, which killed 224 people. Two defendants then faced a death penalty hearing, which resulted in life sentences after the jury could not agree on imposing a death sentence.... [S]ome jurors noted that the terrorists “were suicide bombers, so why give them what they want?”...
December 5, 2016
Goodbye to Judge Leonard B. Sand.
"Leonard B. Sand, Judge in Landmark Yonkers Segregation Case, Dies at 88," is the headline at The New York Times.
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63 comments:
I found this interesting for the scare quotes. Telling.
Yonkers should have declared bankruptcy and been done with it.
Yonkers officials, who denied they were responsible for the segregation, denounced the judge, as did many white residents, some of whom picketed his weekend home in northern Westchester County....
Wait! So there was racial segregation in the north? And the residents of Yonkers didn't welcome their duskier brethren with open arms?
I had it on good authority that such things only happened in the South.
Clearly, I was misinformed.
Nice. Thanks!
I sure hope there will be cries of racism if NY ever decides to change any part of their voting process without DOJ blessing.
Racist Yankees.
Because compelling a city to build housing should be a judges decision?? Isn't this the definition of an activist judge?
"...ordered that the city remedy the housing portion of its violations by adopting a plan for building up to 1,000 units of low- and moderate-income housing in predominantly white neighborhoods."
Did he order those units to be open to people of all races?
he ordered that the city remedy the housing portion of its violations by adopting a plan for building up to 1,000 units of low- and moderate-income housing in predominantly white neighborhoods.
...his weekend home in northern Westchester County....
He 'ordered' the city to build the low- and moderate-income housing[sic] in his own neighborhood!
Right next door to his own house, right? To get the personal benefit of the diversity! How cool is that?
Its nice that you had a good experience in your clerkship Ann, but as a former Yonkers resident I can tell you Leonard Sand caused a lot of grief and misery.
The homes built in the east side of the city were not the main issue. The problem was the forced busing. My family lived a few blocks away from our local school, but because of forced desegregation my younger sisters new school was across the city. She had to ride on a school bus 60 minutes a day each way, as did most of the children of the city. It was a boon to the bus companies, but it wasn't long before my parents (and thousands of other parents) expressed their free will and enrolled their children in local parochial or private schools. My High School was fairly integrated when I graduated (before the rulings) but soon after became 90% minority and frankly school quality eroded. Home values took a hit, as people (of all races) looking for a suburban lifestyle with good schools moved further north. Business suffered, and its been 30 years and the people of Yonkers are still trying to recover and rebuild that city. They have had some success, but you can see the scars to this day. Driving by my old high school it looks old and uncared for. Still open, unlike some other schools, but falling apart.
It would have been better for everyone if Sand left Yonkers alone. But he was on a quest to right a wrong, and it didnt matter how many people had to suffer along the way.
Judge Sands' decision (and the federal enforcement action that led to it) are the type of decision that got us to Trump 30 years later. The accusations of racism, and the forced remedy of building low-income housing, were used against middle-class Yonkers (median family income of $53,000). But the (much) tonier Westchester suburbs like Bronxville ($200,000 median family income), Chappaqua ($180,000), or Katonah (146,000) where the lawyers, doctors, and financiers live were never forced to build affordable housing or take action to integrate. Had anyone attempted to impose such a regime on the wealthy suburbs, they would have used their power and privilege to crush any attempt to do so (cloaked in language of "preserving open space," "protecting environmentally sensitive areas," or "preserving the character and historic areas of the community"). So the limousine liberals from elsewhere in Westchester got to feel good about themselves for "fighting racism" -- I know, I went to school with many of them at the time -- while the brunt of the social engineering fell on the less privileged. And 30 years later, we wonder why the middle and working class whites are abandoning the Democrats.
Pan handling is free speech? What a load of crap.
But he was on a quest to right a wrong, and it didnt matter how many people had to suffer along the way.
He certainly sounds like an activist judge to me. Maybe that was in your hippie stage, Ann.
A genuine question.
I understand and support the notion that courts can determine what is constitutional and what is not. What I do not understand is how some judge is empowered to say "it is not constitutional and here is what you must do to make it constitutional".
I am fine with fed judges making the thumbs up or thumbs down on constitutionality, but from where do they derive their power to say "therefore every elementary school in Kansas City must have a swimming pool". I
I need help.
The Yonkers case wasn't actually settled until 2007. That's 27 years of litigation costs, 27 years of lining lawyers' pockets, 27 years of pouring taxpayer money down a sinkhole. Think about how that money might have been used instead to actually provide low income housing and improve neighborhood schools.
I realize the judges, and they were all activists, who were involved with desegregation cases felt they were doing God's work, but is there anywhere their mandates actually did more good than harm, or at least as much good as harm? The kick of it is, most people, regardless of race or ethnicity, actually prefer to live among their "own." Our goal should be to assure to the extent possible that all communities and neighborhoods, no matter their racial/ethnic makeup, have the resources to provide decent housing and schools. But I'm afraid that's not good enough for our social justice engineers.
I'm glad you had a positive experience with Judge Sand, Ann, but to be honest he doesn't seem to embody the qualities I imagine when I think about the ideal judge. Perhaps his temperament was ideally suited to his profession. Perhaps he was an eminently fair man. If so, good on him. It's just that I don't favor activist judges (and I don't put that in scare quotes). But it is good to know that people who accost me, at times quite belligerently, on public streets because they want my money are merely engaging in the free exercise of their First Amendment rights.
Well, he is in Hell now. I expect he will find the place is managed according to his ideas, if not exactly to his liking.
Forced integration (at your own expense) for thee but not for me. Typical activist judicial hypocrit.
I'm an admiralty lawyer and had several cases before him in the SDNY. I thought he was a good judge.
Clerking for a fine man and a fine judge like Judge Sands is a rare privilege. You should cherish those memories.
Nice obit/tribute to your mentor, Prof. Althouse. We can --and will-- dispute the rulings he made, but who can see into the future? Justice is blind, and it is rough. In Yonkers it was both. How much discretion was there to fashion a "perfect" solution? In such a complex and deeply felt matter? At that time I lived not in Yonkers but Ossining, which had its own issues but thank God not any injunctions prompted by the statistical shamanism of earnest strangers who, as noted above, fought for racial justice and then went home to Chappaqua or Bronxville. We in Ossining watched Yonkers suffer even as we enriched the bus companies through a voluntary arrangement called the Princeton Plan, which abolished school segregation by making every student in a given grade attend the same school. Schools might contain only 2 or even 1 grades but every kid went there, from all over town. It could only work in a small town and it didn't work perfectly. God knows what it cost but my daughter grew up absolutely indifferent to her schoolmates' race.
Of course that was then, when we could still cherish a notion of true color-blindness. Now? Her generation has fallen hard for identity politics and "privilege." Sad.
He sounds like the kind of judge our country is better off without. Social engineering with others' money and others' lives.
Prof., did you stay in contact with him after your clerkship? Did his views evolve? Was he capable of learning?
lweber said...
'I am fine with fed judges making the thumbs up or thumbs down on constitutionality, but from where do they derive their power to say "therefore every elementary school in Kansas City must have a swimming pool". '
Mao can help out with that one.
"Power comes from the barrel of a gun."
Suburban liberals like Sand and Althouse don't ride the subways; they just like to make life unpleasant for those of us with real jobs. What hypocrites they are. Why didn't Sand go live in Bed-Stuy, if diversity is so wonderful? Why doesn't Althouse move to the Southside of Chicago, if she's such a saint?
I wonder if Judge Sand would have ruled that urinating in the street is free speech? Guess he didn't know about the Tragedy of the Commons.
"he ordered that the city remedy the housing portion of its violations by adopting a plan for building up to 1,000 units of low- and moderate-income housing in predominantly white neighborhoods." No municipality or state should expend any funds except by affirmative vote of the relevant legislative body.
"from where do they derive their power to say "therefore every elementary school in Kansas City must have a swimming pool"." Justice, man, justice. A prog judge's will shall be done.
Panhandling as free speech: quite an original mind, that Sand.
The Kansas City case was such a perfect example of judges run amok.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Yonkers thing was earlier but still an example of judicial activism run amok.
Now, the blacks, at least the radicals, want segregation back.
Look, panhandling is free speech. If a starving man can't ask for help from passersby, what can he do?
And, yes, I know that panhandlers aren't "starving," and they can be extremely annoying, and that some of them in the Bay Area live in Oakland and drive every day to San Francisco, and "squeegee men" and the like take advantage of places where traffic is stopped in order to extort money. (There's an intersection near me in Salem that's notoriously slow, and someone is always begging there.) I get all that. But who can say that a man should be forbidden outright from asking a fellow-man for help? Really?
I rode the subways back then. The panhandlers were relentless and endless. "I just got out of Rikers. I don't want to go back to a life of crime. I'm begging you to give me anything you can spare, a nickel or dime, so I don't have to go back to committing crimes." That was one of the spiels. If the guy was large enough, and the train was empty enough, it made for an interesting ride.......Don't subway riders who paid for their ride have the right to get spared such interruptions. A lot of people stopped riding the subways because of the incessant panhandling. That and the graffiti. If you were a working stiff, you felt the subways were there for the panhandlers and the vandals and not for you.
Now, the Yonkers thing -- stipulating that the new housing be built in predominately-white neighborhoods -- seems little more than a variation on "rubbing the puppy's nose in it." Which I have always thought stupid and vile. YMMV, Ann.
William, I know exactly what you mean, and again, it's bloody irritating. Also, you're a guy, and I'm not, so for me it would quickly go well beyond irritating. Still, in principle ... no, you do not "have the right to get spared such interruptions" because you bought a ticket. You do not have the right to cut someone dead (not literally; I'm using English slang) because they had the temerity to ask you for help.
There used to be a phrase about "aggressive panhandling." I gather it was pretty common in NYC. It isn't common in Salem, which is probably why we differ.
Michelle Dulak Thomson said...
"But who can say that a man should be forbidden outright from asking a fellow-man for help? Really?"
When a large cop is standing with his arms across his chest, watching some filthy, drunken skel blocking your path, grabbing your arm and shouting in your face, you will perhaps understand how a slope comes to be slippery.
"Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil"
1) What's w/ the 'as much as...per pupil?' How about giving us an average rather than the most expensive student(s) in the system? Can you imagine if someone chose the lowest cost pupil and wrote 'as little as $X per pupil?'
2) What a deal: say all the pupils cost $11,700, that's a lot of stuff they're getting for twelve grand. I would have assumed that having twice as many teachers (for the tiny class sizes) not to mention cool stuff like a zoo would cost a lot more.
Bigger picture, I think it's great to see so many folks bellyaching in this thread because they don't like that segregation was proactively, forcibly reversed. White privilege.
looks like it's back to an eye-for-and-eye one group caused another 100 years of suffering, and took all the products of their work. Not clear where y'all are in that equation gramma says it looks like maybe 50 years from her side of the crater but y'all keep on adding to your burden every day since you've never matched a full day of our work product under the whip working 7 days a week 5am to 6pm, to be matched two for one going forward. Silly yabit, Twix are for kids. Now get back to work, baby needs some brand new shoes. Payback is a b!@tch isn't?, now own it you SJWs. We’re going to move to Africa ourselves that you abandoned, even though we begged you to return and emulate us. A pity you did not. That part of Africa has even more resources than the U.S. does, conquer it militarily and force a treaty on them that denies them your behavior in the future, for all lovers of freedom that want to come with us and fight, race, creeds, and colors, and sexual preferences. Then we can leave a free life like you used to have and we shed so much blood to give you the same, MLK quote goes here. So good luck.
Liar:
I think it's great to see so many folks bellyaching in this thread because
it didn't happen to you. Endit
If you add a spoonful of sewage to a barrel of wine, you get a barrel of sewage. If you add a spoonful of wine to a barrel of sewage, you get a barrel of sewage.
"He embodied the qualities you imagine when you think about the ideal judge."
BTW, this may be the most intriguing thing I've seen Althouse write here.
Presumably fleshing this out would require showing up for WI Law. So, I was about schedule my LSAT, but then I remembered the retirement.
Can't win em' all.
Forcibly segregated... Like the communism forced on my ancestors on the reservations? Because communism kept my people poor.
All you Leftist Collectivists can kindly go to hell. Or the hell hole of your making.
Speaking of SJWs and SJWWs, is anyone here signing up for the new Crowder/Levin/Malkin/Steyn thing?
I got mine w/ the Crowder mug.
BadL, veterans get a $30 discount.
Levin was on Crowder's show not too long ago. Those two had the opposite of chemistry, whatever that is.
BTW, do folks know that you can get free podcasts of Levin and Savage w/ almost no commercials?
I pay for Rush's on-demand thing, but I haven't listened for a couple months. OTOH, I don't usually go more than a day or two w/o playing Levin and Savage. I wouldn't say that they're better than Rush. I dunno why I'm tired of Rush.
Maybe if I was more in the golden years sorta mindset I'd be impressed by Rush.
Presumably it's a sign of dopiness that I think Rush is a stick in the mud when compared to Crowder.
Of course Rush has been pumping out a lot of content for a long time. Crowder could very well crash and burn when they go daily. The first show from the new studio w/ the in studio guests seemed flat and very poorly produced. How could they not anticipate the weird (as opposed to sexy) Courtney Kirchoff upskirt camera angle? Presumably they've seen Fox, how can they not know the correct way to operate a leg camera?
Not to mention that I'm up to 1226 feeds on Twitter. Compared to that info-storm, Rush and Drudge seem quaint, like NPR.
Don't worry. All the schools in Yonkers now suck. Hooray!
I'm sure in most ways he was a truly fine judge. However, his actions in Yonkers are the definition of activism run amok.
If you're willing to pay for private school and a city income tax, you can move to Yonkers and I can confirm that the garbage men will be very nice.
During the course of the lawsuit, the city's population went from something like 80% white to like 45% white. They managed to desegregate the schools by having all the white residents of Yonkers move to Judge Sands part of Westchester.
I can say from first-hand observation......good riddance!
- Krumhorn
Blogger Jupiter said...
Michelle Dulak Thomson said...
"But who can say that a man should be forbidden outright from asking a fellow-man for help? Really?"
When a large cop is standing with his arms across his chest, watching some filthy, drunken skel blocking your path, grabbing your arm and shouting in your face, you will perhaps understand how a slope comes to be slippery.
That would never happen. There ie no need or benefit to tacking "asked for money" onto the list of criminal statutes the person you describe is violating. Your reaction to Michelle's point really just highlights how she's right.
I read most of the comments and I want to clarify two points in case some of the commenter return to read newer ones:
I had the honor to know Judge Sand socially because my parents were friends with him and his wife.
(1) He absolutely believed in public transportation (even into his 80s) and took the subway in NYC.
(2) His family lived for decades next to a black family on Old Stone Hill Road in Pound Ridge (who happened to be my best friends). They would both later tell the story about how the protectors who picketed his Pound Ridge house were so shocked to realize that he had friendly black neighbors.
I am happy to set the record straight on these two points.
I'm sorry, but living next to a rich black family in freaking Pound Ridge is not the same as living next to a bunch of low-income families in Yonkers. It really makes me sick when suburban liberals trot out that stuff. If you don't move to a low-income neighborhood yourself, you have no business making other people live in one.
And the subway from Grand Central to the federal courthouse is a little different from the subway in the outer boroughs.
It's possible that Judge Sand was so out of touch that he didn't realize these things, I grant you, which would mean that he was more of an ignoramus than a hypocrite.
I am happy to clarify, Sean, that there were no rich black families in Pound Ridge. There were only a handful of families scattered around town and they lived modestly.
GT: I am happy to clarify, Sean, that there were no rich black families in Pound Ridge. There were only a handful of families scattered around town and they lived modestly.
You can "clarify" until the cows come home, but the judge's personal transportation and housing situation was in no way comparable to what he imposed on other citizens.
Anglelyne: My point was that the Judge lived modestly and used public transportation. This is in sharp contrast to earlier comments which incorrectly assumed that he lived in some private gated estate and had a driver and a limousine. (I exaggerate to make my point.)
GT: This is in sharp contrast to earlier comments which incorrectly assumed that he lived in some private gated estate and had a driver and a limousine. (I exaggerate to make my point.)
I just reread the earlier comments. None of them made any such assumption, even accounting for exaggeration. I'm sure you understood the point the commenters were making about social engineers and personal consequences nonetheless.
Ahhh, magnet schools. I've seen them in two cities. Both started out with sky high hopes. And both actually achieved some impressive, early results.
Then came the law suits:
- Too many of the kids, selected by achievement tests, were white
- Too many of the teachers, selected by meeting certain standards, were white.
As predictable as the phases of the moon, a solution was found.
Black kids that did not meet standards were enrolled.
Black teachers that did not meet standards were employed.
As predictable as the phases of the moon, results.....
The key is quality teachers. Unions and lawyers keep that from changing. As the KC experience shows, higher pay does not always translate to higher quality teachers.
In the Montgomery, Alabama school system we had an interesting experience. Lee HS was graded as failing year after year after year. The state kept threatening to take over the school. But the threat rang hollow and nothing improved. Even by the pathetic standards used to grade teachers, Lee was a cesspool of incompetency.
Finally the State said, "No more". The school district finally did something. They removed every single teacher from Lee HS. Now that may have helped Lee. But what of the teachers? Why they just got spread across the remaining schools in the system.
In the early days of the environmental movement some ill advised folks said, "The solution to pollution is dilution" (i.e. dump it in the ocean where the vastness of the seas will make the pollution insignificant.
DOesn't work for toxic teachers either.
GT,
To the best of my knowledge, practically everyone takes the subway in NYC. Yes, there's surface traffic (where isn't there?), but most of the residents don't even own cars. Taking public transit in NYC is no badge of virtue.
Michelle, I was trying to illustrate (with a true statement) that Judge Sand was not as out-of-touch with the average person as others may suggest. He did not live in NYC. He and his wife would take the train in and then take a subway (as opposed to a cab) to get around.
Lyin' said: "I think it's great to see so many folks bellyaching in this thread because they don't like that segregation was proactively, forcibly reversed. White privilege."
Bull. We have deliberately chosen to live in integrated places, where our children are often minorities in their schools. The objection is to the wealthy and upper middle class "proactively, forcibly" reversing segregation in working and middle class communities, while sealing off the places where they live. In fact, if one were cynical, one might think that they are pushing "affordable housing" in the working and middle class communities to avoid having to desegregate their own communities (or even to increase the relative value of their communities and therefore their real estate). That is the white privilege here. But keep accusing the white working class and middle class of racism. I am sure that will bring them back into the Democratic party.
GT, thanks for making my point. Judge Sand had a place in Pound Ridge, which is 96% white and has a median family income of $191,000. A google search reveals 12 -- 12! -- affordable housing units. You can read here about residents of that part of Westchester (including Pound Ridge) opposing affordable housing efforts: http://www.lewisboroledger.com/5758/astorino-fires-up-residents-over-countys-affordable-housing-deal/
I am sure Judge Sand got along well with the African-American family that happened to live next door, and thought he was fighting racism, but he ordered 1,000 affordable housing units to be built far away in middle-class Yonkers, at the opposite end of the county, with a population density of over 10,000/sq. mi., and not in wealthy Pound Ridge (density of 207/sq. mi). And not in Chappaqua or Bronxville either.
I'm sorry for your loss, professor. I hope you go to his funeral.
Feedom89: I would just point out that Yonkers was the subject of the case and not any other place in Westchester County.
Pound Ridge has very large zoning areas and there is very little land (perhaps none) left on which to build. Moreover, it has been this way for about the last 15 years.
GT,
Again, thanks for making my point. Very large zoning areas precluding further building like those in Pound Ridge are a type of exclusionary zoning (usually done under the guise of "preserving open space" or "preserving the character of the community"). They can be overturned by the courts. But federal and state judges, like Judge Sand, are much more likely to overturn zoning rules in middle-class areas than in the wealthy areas where they and their peers live.
And the fact that the case was brought against Yonkers and not anywhere else in Westchester speaks volumes about the federal lawyers who brought the case, although I note that the federal government is now (30 years later) going against the more affluent areas in Westchester.
GT: Freedom89 has posted the median family income in Pound Ridge. Maybe this is the moment where you trot the next suburban liberal line: "$191,000 a year isn't really rich." Then tell us just how many acres that black family owned.
Freedom89: The zoning in Pound Ridge has been the same for many decades...I'd venture to say back to the 1950s if not before. It isn't like the town changed the zoning to be exclusionary because of some new federal law.
Sean: That family's son is my best friend..since first grade in fact. And they had plenty of land and a long driveway with an outdoor terraced pool. The father had a job with a defense contractor and the mother raised two terrific children. The father also built the house himself in the early 1970s. I know numerous families in Pound Ridge who didn't have incomes even half as high as that. I also just received a beautiful condolence note from that family to deliver to Mrs. Sand.
GT: $192,000 today was $33,000 in 1972. Are you saying the black family made less than $16,000 back then? Because I highly doubt that. I repeat, the fact that Judge Sand had an upper middle class black neighbor didn't justify him in demanding that people in Yonkers live next door to low-income housing, although I'm sure he thought it did. He was a hypocrite, like all suburban liberals. If you don't live in the city, your sanctimonious babble leaves me cold.
Sean: I have spoken factually and helpfully and since I have lived on the border of Harlem for the last 17 years (and before that in Pound Ridge from 1968 to 1999), the last thing I am is sanctimonious. I help people all day solve problems with bureaucratic agencies for free. At the end of the day, your parents should have taught you that no matter your differences with someone, it is bad manners to speak poorly of the recently departed. I am certain other readers of this blog would agree with me. Shame on you.
GT: Tell that to the law professors of America next time another Scalia dies. I model my behavior on that of the gatekeepers for our profession. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
There's alot more that Judge Sand did and said that has gone unnoticed by the liberal media.
For starters, he failed to recuse himself even though he was related to the Editor/Owner of The New York Times, the main cheerleader for the slum project.
Second, he attempted to discriminate against poor people who sent their children to parochial/Catholic schools. That drew the attention of John Cardinal O'Connor so Sand and the left-wing goons at the NAACP and the other lawyers backed down before the national GOP caught wind of what was happening and started impeachment proceedings against Sand.
Third, this liberal elitist tried to STEAL Catholic Church property from the Dunwoodie Seminary to make the economics work AND to reward the lawyers in the case with millions of dollars stolen from working-class and middle-class Catholics.
This guy should have been impeached if not removed. The GOP's failure to go after this Upper West Side clown is one reason why so many GOP and conservatives supported Donald Trump, who doesn't play to get along with those who attack him.
Shame on the GOP and the Catholic Church for being misled by this liar.
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