Stephen BergsteinAlumnus class of '93
For Stephen Bergstein, success has come to him in many ways. Not only has he won many important cases, but he has also been able to carry out his passion and beliefs throughout his life after leaving CUNY. His firm, Bergstein & Ullrich, has taken on civil rights and employment discrimination cases under Title VII and Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act for the past decade.
One recent victory: Jackler v. Byrne, in which a police officer in Middletown, New York, was fired for refusing to falsify a report that implicated another officer engaged in misconduct. The Court of Appeals held that the fired officer’s First Amendment rights had been violated, and that the police officer’s refusal to lie was free speech.
“That got a lot of attention, partly because no one is winning these cases anymore,” Bergstein said. That was after a Supreme Court ruling, Garcetti v. Ceballos, made it tougher for public employee whistleblowers to win their lawsuits. “In this case, we got around the Supreme Court ruling.”
How about a sexual harassment case in which the plaintiff faced not sexual misconduct in the workplace, but a hostile work environment? Bergstein’s firm also won that one—Pucino v. Verizon—last year in the Court of Appeals.
“There was evidence that women were given unfair work assignments compared to men and unfair discipline,” said Bergstein, who also wrote about the case in his blog, noting there was additional gender-specific verbal harassment.
Then there’s the jury that awarded one of Bergstein’s clients $1.25 million in a student racial bullying case, Zeno v. Pine Plains Central School District.
Bergstein admitted that such civil rights victories look terrific on paper, but they can take years of hard work. The sexual harassment case, for example, was brought in 2003 and won seven years later.
“There’s no such thing as a slam-dunk civil rights case,” he said. “It’s the kind of work you have to believe in.”
When Bergstein was looking at law schools, he felt CUNY Law would be the right fit because of its mission and focus on public service and civil rights. That dovetailed with his early career as a newspaper journalist in Kingston and Middletown, New York, covering local news, planning boards, and school boards.
He felt inspired by the dean of the law school at the time—the legendary civil rights attorney Haywood Burns—who walked the halls and made a point of getting to know the students. “When you have professors who are still doing this kind of work, it makes that career choice much more realistic,” he said.
That includes Professor Rick Rossein and the Equality Concentration, which features cases that Rossein personally worked on. Taking Rossein’s class gave Bergstein a leg up in a summer internship at a firm now known as Sussman & Watkins, in Goshen, New York.
“It’s hard to learn that on your own. The learning curve would be enormous,” said Bergstein. (Sussman gave Bergstein his first job out of law school; he stayed at the firm for eight years.)
The concentration also helped temper students’ expectations on the outcome of difficult-to-win discrimination cases. “You need a dose of reality when you’re learning. It’s one thing to read a great case in your casebooks, but what looks great on paper doesn’t always work out in trial,” said Bergstein.
Besides the faculty, Bergstein credits classmates, who came “from all walks of life,” for making his CUNY Law experience so positive and lively.
“I don’t know how my legal education could have been any better anywhere else,” said Bergstein.
