H. Lee Sarokin, former federal judge from New Jersey.
In late 1979, four judges nominated by President Jimmy Carter joined the federal district court bench in New Jersey, becoming the backbone of the court for decades: Mercer County Prosecutor Anne Thompson, state chancery Judge Harold Ackerman, Riker Danzig partner Dickenson Debevoise, and trial lawyer H. Lee Sarokin.
None attracted as much attention with their actions from the bench as Judge Sarokin, who authored nearly 2,500 opinions over 17 years, and not for the weak-kneed. Early on, he castigated the Social Security Administration as a “heartless and indifferent bureaucratic monster,” when it refused a rehearing to a mentally ill man who misunderstood his hearing date, summoned the director of the IRS to answer an order to show cause when it went after the assets of anti-poverty program trustees, criticized the Small Business Administration for being “callous and machinelike” and slammed a law firm seeking $60,000 in fees over a $1,500 rent dispute for the pursuit of “principal over principle.” He threw out indictments of Chinese businessmen accused of shipping high technology military components because the law was too vague, cut the sentence of a high-ranking legislator found guilty of corruption after a community outpouring (the Third Circuit praised his “scrupulous sense of fairness”), and ordered return of 2,000 files from an Asbury Park law firm while declaring the search warrant unconstitutionally broad (the Third Circuit upheld the decision and criticized the government in even stronger terms).
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