Two months ago, as the federal corruption trial of Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey loomed, Mr. Menendez’s lawyers made another of many requests to the court.
The presiding judge, Sidney H. Stein, who has kept a firm hand on the trial and its timing, denied the request. In a note at the top of the memo, he wrote: “The parties are directed to avoid needless motion practice, which wastes everyone’s time.”
The note offered a window into the personality of the judge who has presided over Mr. Menendez’s federal bribery trial: a jurist with almost 30 years of experience on the bench who has instilled a keen sense of order in a process that can often be plagued by delays.
Judge Stein, 78, was born in Passaic, N.J. He graduated from Princeton and earned his law degree at Yale. Before beginning his law career, he taught junior high school in New York, according to a questionnaire submitted to the Senate before his confirmation to the bench. After graduating in 1972, he clerked for Judge Stanley Fuld, then the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.
He was appointed by former President Bill Clinton to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1995 and assumed senior status in 2010.
Unlike many federal judges who begin as prosecutors, Judge Stein spent his early career in private practice. He later co-founded a litigation firm with four friends and also represented criminal defendants pro bono on assignment from the Court of Appeals.
He has overseen the cases of several high-profile defendants. Among them are Jennifer Shah, a star on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” who was sentenced to 78 months in prison in 2023 for her involvement in a telemarketing scheme, and Hassan Nemazee, a major donor to Democratic politicians, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2010 for bank fraud.
He also took the unusual step in 2018 of granting a new trial to a man convicted a decade earlier of providing support to Al Qaeda.
Judge Stein was recently assigned to oversee a lawsuit by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft, the makers of ChatGPT, over copyright issues connected with The Times’s written works.
But Mr. Menendez’s trial has likely been the most widely watched — and covered — case of Judge Stein’s tenure so far.
Russell Capone, a former chief of the Southern District’s public corruption unit who was a law clerk for Judge Stein in 2006, noted his measured demeanor in the courtroom.
“I think he’s very well-suited to handle a case of this magnitude and with this type of public attention on it,” Mr. Capone said, adding: “He’s confident, and he is really down the middle.”
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