Jack B. Weinstein, a legal scholar and famously independent federal judge in Brooklyn who led the legal system into an era of mass tort litigation, changing the way huge classes of people claim injuries from toxins, pollutants and faulty products could get redress in the courts, died on June 15 at his home in Great Neck, NY. He was 99.

Judge Weinstein was on the bench for 53 years and spend nearly a decade as the chief judge of the Eastern District of New York. Throughout his tenure, until he announced his retirement last year at the age of 98, he kept protesting the strictures of the criminal justice system.

Judge Weinstein’s view of his profession was complicated. “One of the great resources of our nation is the legal profession,” he said at a symposium in his honor in 2001, 53 years after he joined the bar. “It is entrepreneurial. It is selfish. It is sometimes stupid. It has all kinds of conflicts of interest. And yet it is independent, fighting for individuals against institutions.”