Joseph Weintraub

Joseph Weintraub (1908–1977) was Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court from 1957 to 1973. He previously served as an Associate Justice of the same court from 1956 to 1957.

Among the landmark decisions authored by Weintraub was Robinson v. Cahill, which declared that the constitutional rights of urban school children were being violated by the state's failure to provide an equitable system of educational funding. He also authored State v. Shack, 58 N.J. 297 (1971),in which the New Jersey Supreme Court decided that a lawyer and a health services worker who came to a farm to help migrant workers were not trespassing when they refused to leave at the farm owner's demand. In that opinion the Chief Justice wrote: "Property rights serve human values. They are recognized to that end and limited by it." On that basis he concluded that the farmer could not isolate the migrant worker from the outside world. Another remarkable opinion was his concurrence in In re Adoption of E, 59 N.J. 36 (1971). The court had held that a prospective adoptive family could not be disqualified simply because the couple were atheists. The Chief Justice's concurrence would have gone even further; he wrote that religious belief should not be considered at all in deciding whether a family should be allowed to adopt because judges have no ability to evaluate the quality of religious beliefs.

During his sixteen year tenure as Chief Justice, the New Jersey Supreme Court played a leading role nationally in transforming and modernizing the common law to accord with realities of life in the mid-twentieth century. With Justices John Francis and Nathan Jacobs in particular, the Court struck a new course in the areas of consumer protection, product safety, rights of tenants and liability for negligence. For a perceptive survey of his career by a later Justice of the N.J. Supreme Court, see O'Hern, Brennan and Weintraub: Two Stars to Guide Us, 46 Rutgers Law Review 1049 (1994).

In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Justice Weintraub presided over one of the more controversial cases in New Jersey's state history. Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a professional prize fighter, along with Jon Artis, lost their appeal on a very questionable murder case, resulting in both of the defendants' life sentences. Justice Weintraub acknowledged several holes in the prosecutions testimony. Despite damning evidence implicating Carter's and Artis' innocents, Weintraub's court denied the appeal. Weintraub's chilling language resonated throughout the African American community of New Jersey - an African American community undoubtedly subjected to a bevy of discriminatory practices and racially charged social barriers that went over-looked and ignored in New Jersey's history during the 60s and 70s.

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