Michael Rozen (LA '86) last night delivered a speech in which he discussed the various cases he has dealt with throughout his career, all of which have been designed to provide compensation for the victims of deadly events and corporate products.
Rozen is a partner at Feinberg Rozen LLP, a dispute negotiation firm. The lecture was titled "Negotiating with Thousands: Achieving Settlements for Victims of 9/11, the Gulf oil spill, and many other large multi-party claims." The event, which was held in the Cabot Intercultural Center, was part of the Charles Francis Adams Lecture Series and was sponsored by the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.
"How much is a life worth?" Rozen asked, a question he has had to answer many times as part of his job. "I would tell you that it's variable - it all depends on the time, the location, the lawyers and who's paying for it."
Rozen described the numerous multi-party disputes he has had to settle and negotiate over his career. His career began in the early 1980s, trying to attain compensation for people impacted by Agent Orange, the lethal, dioxin-laced substance that the U.S. military had used as a chemical weapon during the Vietnam War. This project was controversial because of its uneven distribution of funds. $12,000 was given to veterans who had been exposed to Agent Orange, in contrast to the $30,000 given to women who had been made widows by the deadly product. Certain companies claimed that the U.S. military had forced them into buying the materials used to create Agent Orange, meaning they had no obligation to contribute to the federal compensation project.
The same types of obstacles have emerged in the many other similar compensation projects Rozen was worked on since then. Some of the products involved in Rozen's cases have included Dalkon Shield, a female contraceptive intrauterine device that caused severe injuries to many of its users, and the synthetic estrogen DES, which was given to women under the misconception that it would limit pregnancy complications.
Rozen spoke in depth about his experience serving as deputy special master of the Federal September 11, 2001 Victim Compensation Fund.
"I personally met with 95 percent of the nearly 3,000 claimants we received," he said. "Over 1,000 of them started crying on my shoulder as I spoke with them. Several hundred of these claimants turned out to be outright frauds and were sent to prison by the FBI."
Congress allowed a total of $7 billion to be allocated to the families of 9/11 victims, a figure that Rozen said is controversial. The $1.7 million given per individual was substantially more than what had been provided to victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and that angered families who had been impacted by those two attacks, he said.
Congress had initially intended for just $3.5 billion to be given to each family, but Rozen and his team scrambled to get it to double the total, he said. Even with more compensation, the amount distributed per victim was less than the families had been hoping for, and it was difficult to distribute the funds in a non-discriminatory fashion, he said.
"The value of life should have been at its pinnacle after 9/11, but it wasn't," he said. "For one, it was the taxpayers' money we were seeking, and furthermore, every single congressman was arching over our shoulder while we working on this issue, and they all had one common theme: do not give too much money to rich people. We had arguments you could not believe from every single party you could imagine."
By contrast, Rozen pointed out, the people who had lost family members to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, the incident that triggered the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, were given $15 million in compensation for each of the 11 victims.
"BP Oil was the payer in this case," Rozen explained. "The federal government ordered them to do so."
As tragic an incident as this explosion was, Rozen questioned whether it made sense to pay each of the explosion's victims nearly 10 times what each of the victims from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had received.
Rozen said these examples illustrate the inexact science of his profession and how he must often deal with a wide variety of legal and ethical dilemmas.
"I don't think companies set out to do wrong, but it's impossible to control everybody's actions at once," he said.
In an interview with the Daily following the lecture, Rozen reflected on traveling to Tufts for this lecture, which marked only the second time he had returned to campus since graduating in 1986.
"I was very nervous about coming back here," he said. "I got butterflies when I arrived to campus, but it was a huge honor for me to be able to come back and address the same community which I had once been a part of and which has influenced my life so much."
