Ira M. Millstein, a respected lawyer who crusaded for greater independence from corporate boards, invoked his bipartisanship in helping shepherd Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the federal bench and carefully helped New York avoid bankruptcy in the mid-1970s .died Wednesday at his home in Mamaroneck, N.Y. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Elizabeth Millstein Tremain.
Mr. Millstein trained as an engineer at Columbia before turning to law and was respected for his thoroughness and tact. He became the senior partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a New York-based law firm, where he specialized in antitrust law and government regulation. As a member of the firm, he was recruited to untangle corporate governance loopholes at Bethlehem Steel, The Walt Disney Company, General Electric, General Motors, Macy’s, Tyco International and Westinghouse, among other companies.
“All our idols were lost to foreign competition and subject to takeovers,” he told the New York Times in 2006, as he pushed for more oversight of New York’s myriad public authorities as well. “Where were the boards? Inert.”
Throughout his career, Mr. Millstein has pushed for more aggressive corporate governance than directors in the private sector. “The evolution of directors is necessary to keep our system free from further intrusive regulation,” he said in an interview with Strategy+business magazine in 2005. He further expounded his views in a book, “The Activist Director: Lessons From the Boardroom and the Future of the Corporation”, published in 2016.
He was also recruited into political leadership roles that transcended the boundaries of politically embattled government bureaucracies.
He was president of the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy from 1991 to 1999. He was selected to lead Governor George E. Pataki’s New York State Commission on Public Administration Reform, which streamlined and streamlined hundreds of quasi-independent agencies. And he led a special mayoral commission tasked with investigating the 1977 blackout that virtually paralyzed New York. The commission concluded that the blackout was caused by mismanagement by Consolidated Edison and recommended that the utility’s rates be lowered when it provided inadequate service.
Mr. Millstein’s voiced his support for Ruth Bader Ginsburg during Senate hearings on her nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1993, noting in his testimony that he had known both her and her husband, Martin Ginsburg, since 1957, when Mr. Ginsburg was a summer associate at Weil. He remembered President Jimmy Carter’s appointment of Justice Ginsburg to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980, and to his touch it was wilted and probably dead.
“Opposition to Ruth was based largely on the claim that she was a one-issue lawyer — women’s rights,” Mr. Milstein testified. A lifelong Democrat, he contacted an old acquaintance, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, asking for an audience so Mr. Hatch could “decide on facts, not gossip and hearsay.” he said.
“The senator apparently concluded that Ruth Ginsburg was, indeed, a legal scholar of no ideological school,” Mr. Milstein said. “The opposition then seemed to have melted away. And Ruth was also confirmed on her way to today.”
In October 1975, as New York City faced a crippling fiscal collapse, Mr. Millstein advised city officials against filing for bankruptcy and instead helped draft a formal report certifying the city’s default. Signed by Mayor Abraham D. Beame, the petition was ready to be served on the banks that were the city’s top creditors and was accompanied by a news release that shifted the blame.
“I have been advised by the auditor,” the mayor said in the release, that the city “does not have sufficient cash available to meet the debt obligations due today.”
At the last minute, municipal unions dipped into their pension funds to save the city, and the signed petition was never invoked. For years it hung framed in Mr. Millstein’s Fifth Avenue law office.
In “The Activist Director,” Mr. Millstein described the city’s fiscal crisis as “one of the worst examples of corporate governance oversight I’ve seen.”
He also wrote that he was one of three Beame confidantes approached by Gov. Hugh L. Carey to persuade the mayor to resign. They refused out of personal loyalty to Mr. Beam.
Ira Martin Millstein was born on November 8, 1926 in Manhattan to Harry and Birdie (Rosenbaum) Millstein. His father was a furniture salesman. his mother managed the household.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University’s School of Engineering in 1946.
But engineering was not for Mr. Millstein after all, and the assistant dean at Columbia Law School, who taught an undergraduate law course for engineers, steered him toward a legal career. Mr. Millstein graduated from law school in 1949.
He was later the founding chair of the Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School.
After working briefly as a special assistant to the United States attorney general in the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, he joined Weil, Gotshal & Manges in 1951. He stepped down from day-to-day management of the firm in 1999 but never retired.
In 1949 he married Diane Greenberg. died in 2010. In addition to his daughter, Elizabeth, he is survived by a son, James E. Millstein, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Both his children are lawyers. Two sisters, Lucille M. Etra and Marcia M. Miller, are deceased. His marriage to Susan Marie Frame in 2013 ended in divorce
Among Mr. Millstein’s political roles was chairman of the New York Governor’s Task Force on Pension Fund Investments, in which he urged the state to use its assets more aggressively on public and corporate policy issues. He has also been an advisor to the Business Roundtable, an organization of executives. As president of the Central Park Conservancy, he called for local property owners to be empowered to tax themselves to support their neighborhood parks.
Describing his role in New York’s fiscal crisis as a “pro bono, official kibitzer,” Mr. Millstein recalled in an interview for this obituary in 2021 that the night the city nearly went bankrupt, he was running from his Midtown office at Gracie Mansion. , the mayor’s residence, when he was held up by a man who demanded his wallet. When he opened it to show that all he had was $10, the man said, “Well, I’ll take it.”
“I said, ‘Look, I’m on my way back to meet with the mayor,'” Mr. Millstein recalled. I have.’ He let me go, so I went to the garage, got the car, and went back to the Gracie mansion. Where else could this happen but New York City?’
