Abraham Pomerantz

Abraham L. Pomerantz was a 1924 graduate of Brooklyn Law School and a founding partner of the law firm of Pomerantz Haudek Block Grossman & Gross LLP. He is considered by many to have been the "dean of the class action bar".^[1] Pomerantz pioneered suits by small shareholders against officials of such big corporations as McDonnell Douglas Corp. and the Dreyfus Fund. He specialized in so-called derivative suits, in which the company receives the award and passes it on to all stockholders.^[2]

Pomerantz served as U.S. Deputy Chief Counsel prosecuting industrial war criminals such as those at I.G. Farben but resigned at the Nuremberg Trials in protest at the low caliber of the judges assigned to try these cases.^[3] In the introduction to the printed script of Judgment at Nuremberg, Abby Mann credited a conversation with Pomerantz for giving him the initial interest in Nuremberg.^[4]

At the National Conference on the German Problem (Society for the Prevention of World War III) held on March 6, 1947 Pomerantz made a presentation on the Nuremberg trials where he noted a lack of resources, poor quality of US judges, and incompetence of the US occupation government. He complained in his speech:

"Up to this moment, no single Nazi industrialist has been brought to trial. Nevertheless, the prosecutions are scheduled to end this year. Some few industrialists will be tried, and possibly convicted. The rest will go scot free... I have been struggling with how... to depict to you the chaos, the confusion, the demoralization that is taking place there."[1]

Pomerantz died November 20, 1982 at the age of 79.^[5]

The Pomerantz Law Firm provides funding support for the Abraham L.Pomerantz Lecture series which focuses on topics of corporate securities law and related issues of professional responsibility.^[6]

References