WWII submarine vet ruled in landmark case that led to Agent Orange exposure settlement

Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Jack Weinstein, a submariner in World War II, presided over the 1984 class action suit brought by veterans seeking compensation from seven chemical companies for the illnesses they charged were traceable to exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam. “The veterans were treated dreadfully at the time [by their government] and I, as a veteran, had a great deal of empathy for them,” Weinstein said later in an interview. “It was obvious right from the beginning that the case was a political-legal case and not a technological case” that would turn on whether the veteran plaintiffs could directly establish causation between the spraying of the defoliant by C-123 aircraft and “all the diseases that the veterans were afraid of,” Weinstein said. Weinstein pressed the lawyers for the veterans and the chemical companies to come to a settlement before the case went to a jury.

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