Judge Meister is a Town Justice in the Town of Mamaroneck. He is a former two-term President of the Westchester County Magistrates Association, and is currently a Director of the New York State Magistrates Association. Prior to entering private practice, he served four years on active duty in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the United States Navy, as a prosecutor, defense counsel, and military judge, for which he was awarded the Secretary of the Navy’s Medal for Achievement.
Judge Meister graduated from Yale College summa cum laude, and from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
He began his career in private practice at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and has for the past twenty-six years been a partner, and now Senior Counsel, at the firm of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, in New York City. In addition to trying cases in the fields of criminal and commercial law, taxation, and intellectual property, his pro bono experience includes a successful challenge to the military death penalty on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU, and the New York City Bar Association. He is Chair of the National Institute of Military Justice, an organization devoted to public education and improvement of the military law system, and has travelled to Guantanamo Bay as an observer and reporter on military commission hearings. He has been awarded the New York City Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award for representation of capital defendants, and has obtained for his law firm the Human Rights Award of the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Beacon of Justice Award of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association for representation of indigent defendants.
Judge Meister has been a frequent author of professional, nautical, humorous, and literary articles with titles including Justice Tempered With Murphy, An Ensign for the Coffin, and The Day I Cross-Examined Santa Claus.
Judge Meister is color-blind and occasionally wears mis-matched socks.