Paul A. Engelmayer
Paul Adam Engelmayer is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States district judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He was appointed in 2011 by President Barack Obama.Early life and education
Engelmayer was born in 1961 in New York City. He graduated from Harvard University in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude. After spending a year as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, he attended Harvard Law School, where he was the treasurer of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated in 1987 with a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude.
After law school, Engelmayer was a law clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from 1987 to 1988, and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1988 to 1989.Career
From 1989 to 1994, Engelmayer served as a federal prosecutor for the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. He served as an assistant United States attorney from 1989 to 1994, and as the Deputy Chief Appellate Attorney in 1994.
From 1994 to 1996, Engelmayer served as an assistant to the United States Solicitor General Drew S. Days III in Washington D.C. In that role, he argued four cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. As of taking the bench, he had argued over 20 appellate cases.
In 1996, Engelmayer returned to the United States Attorney's Office in Manhattan, serving as the Chief of the Major Crimes Unit. He led the prosecution of Lawrence X. Cusack III, who created and sold $7 million worth of forged documents claiming that President John F. Kennedy paid hush money to conceal a supposed affair with Marilyn Monroe. Engelmayer also received the U.S. Attorney's Director's Award for Superior Performance in 1998 in connection with his prosecution of William F. Duker, a New York City lawyer who defrauded the FDIC and the Resolution Trust Corporation of $1.4 million in overbillings. Engelmayer and Lewis Liman, a future colleague on the Southern District of New York bench, also prosecuted three defendants for a scheme to extort $40 million from the actor Bill Cosby by using threats to publicly claim that one of them was Cosby's illegitimate daughter.
In 2000, Engelmayer joined the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in Manhattan as a partner. He was the partner in charge of the New York office from 2005 until he was appointed as a federal judge in 2011.
Engelmayer is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has lectured or taught at numerous law schools and professional conferences. He is a trustee of the Harvard Law Review. In a 2001 Wall Street Journal op-ed, he discussed the challenges prosecutors investigating President Bill Clinton's pardons of Marc Rich and others faced. In a keynote speech in 2015, he called on Congress to pass an insider trading law.Federal judicial service
On February 2, 2011, President Barack Obama nominated Engelmayer to fill the judicial seat vacated by Judge Gerard E. Lynch, who was elevated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The American Bar Association rated Engelmayer as Unanimously Well Qualified. On March 16, Engelmayer attended a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. On March 31, Senator Charles Grassley placed Engelmayer's nomination on hold, along with two other nominations. Grassley later lifted the holds, and the Senate Judiciary Committee referred Engelmayer's nomination to the full Senate. On July 26, the Senate confirmed Engelmayer by a 98–0 vote. He received his commission on July 27, 2011.Notable civil cases and rulings
NYC subway advertisements
In 2012, in American Freedom Defense Initiative v. Metropolitan Transit Authority, Engelmayer held that the MTA violated the First Amendment in refusing to allow a pro-Israel advertisement to appear on New York City subways and buses. The plaintiff advocacy organization had sought to place, in response to ads it viewed as anti-Israel, an ad that read: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man" and "Support Israel. Defeat Jihad." The MTA blocked the ad based on a policy banning ads that demeaned people based on specified characteristics, including race, color, religion, and national origin. Engelmayer held that the ad was protected political speech and that, because the MTA's demeaning-speech policy was selective, banning such speech aimed only at certain categories of people, it was content-based without justification. The MTA allowed the ad to run, with a disclaimer.Emergency rescue of AIG
In 2012, in Starr Int’l Co. vs. Federal Reserve Bank of N.Y., Engelmayer dismissed multi-billion-dollar damages claims brought against the Federal Reserve Bank of New York by a major stockholder in American International Group, Inc. The state-law claims, for breach of fiduciary duty, arose from FRBNY's exercise of emergency rescue powers during the 2008 financial crisis. Engelmayer held that the claims were federally preempted and that the plaintiff had failed to plead that FRBNY had taken control of AIG.In 2013, Engelmayer upheld New York City's policy of awarding bridge and tunnel toll discounts to residents of certain neighborhoods. The plaintiffs, non-resident motorists, had claimed an infringement of the right to travel and of the dormant commerce clause.Exotic dancers' wage claims
In 2013 and 2014, in Hart v. Rick's Cabaret, Intern., Inc., Engelmayer issued pretrial decisions holding a Manhattan strip club liable to a class of more than 1,900 exotic dancers for minimum wage, overtime, and other labor law violations. He held that the dancers were employees, not independent contractors, and protected by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the New York Labor Law. These decisions awarded the class $10.8 million in damages, with additional claims set for trial. The case settled shortly before trial for approximately $15.5 million.In 2014, Engelmayer presided over a two-week jury trial of copyright infringement and Lanham Act false-endorsement claims brought by the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys against the energy drink company Monster Energy, which had used segments of five Beastie Boys songs to promote its products online. The jury found for the Beastie Boys and awarded $1.7 million in damages. Engelmayer's post-trial rulings upheld the verdict and awarded the Beastie Boys an additional $668,000 in prevailing party legal fees.Music licensing antitrust litigation
In 2014, Engelmayer sustained conspiracy and monopolization claims under the Sherman Antitrust Act brought by a class of local television broadcast televisions against SESAC, LLC, the nation's third-largest music licensing organization. The case later settled for $58.5 million, with SESAC agreeing to henceforth resolve disputes over royalty rates in arbitration. In approving the class settlement and fee award, Engelmayer equated its terms to the landmark antitrust consent decrees that for decades had bound ASCAP and BMI, the nation's two largest music licensing organizations.Off-label marketing
In 2015, in a closely watched action for injunctive relief, Amarin Pharma, Inc. v. U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Engelmayer held that the First Amendment bars the Food and Drug Administration from prosecuting a pharmaceutical manufacturer for misbranding, where the manufacturer's conduct consisted only of truthful speech marketing an off-label use of an FDA-approved product. He held that the First Amendment protects truthful speech by a manufacturer about a product's off-label uses, much as it protects the same speech when made by other speakers, such as doctors. The FDA did not appeal.Bernard L. Madoff bankruptcy
Between 2016 and 2019, Engelmayer issued a series of decisions reviewing and approving aspects of the process of valuing and validating customer claims against the bankruptcy estate of Bernard L. Madoff's company.Disabled group home settlement
Between 2016 and 2019, Engelmayer presided over litigation over claims on behalf of severely disabled adults of years of physical abuse and deficient care at the Union Avenue IRA, a state-run group home staff called the "Bronx Zoo". In 2019, after Engelmayer sustained the claims of constitutional, statutory, and state-law violations and strongly urged the state to settle, New York State agreed to pay the residents $6 million and to surrender control of the facility to a private nonprofit agency.Mirena multi-district litigation
In 2019, Engelmayer granted summary judgment for the defense, ending a nationwide products liability Multidistrict Litigation spanning claims by 920 plaintiffs. The plaintiffs claimed that the synthetic hormone secreted by Mirena, an intrauterine contraceptive product made and marketed by Bayer AG and affiliates, caused users to suffer idiopathic intracranial hypertension, a condition involving buildup of cerebrospinal fluid around the brain. Engelmayer held that the plaintiffs had not adduced evidence to establish general causation—the capacity of Mirena to cause IIH. He had earlier excluded plaintiffs' seven proposed general causation experts because their testimony did not satisfy Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Federal Rule of Evidence 702.Airbnb data ordinance
In 2019, in Airbnb, Inc. v. City of New York, Engelmayer enjoined a New York City ordinance that required home-sharing companies to turn over voluminous data monthly about hosts, finding it facially invalid under the Fourth Amendment. Calling the scale of the required monthly productions breathtaking and unprecedented, he wrote: "The city has not cited any decision suggesting that the governmental appropriation of private business records on such a scale, unsupported by individualized suspicion or any tailored justification, qualifies as a reasonable search and seizure." He added: "An attempt by a municipality in an era before electronic data storage to compel an entire industry monthly to copy and produce its records as to all local customers would have been unthinkable under the Fourth Amendment." New York City and Airbnb later settled the lawsuit.