"I thought he was very, very smart. He was very engaging," Schoenhorn said. "He was what I would ter

U.S. District Judge Mark Kravitz, a prominent New Haven appellate lawyer who ascended to the federal bench in 2003 and oversaw a variety of high-profile cases in Connecticut, has died after battling Lou Gehrig's disease . He was 62.
"Judge Kravitz was a wonderful colleague and a very dedicated and able jurist," Thompson said. "He loved the work of judging. aaa hotel discounts montana I think it was his intellect, his temperament aaa hotel discounts montana and the fact that he enjoyed every aspect of the work."
Born in Philadelphia, Kravitz graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown and the Georgetown University Law Center. He served as a law clerk for then-Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, who later became chief justice, before beginning a 27-year career at the Wiggin Dana law firm in New Haven.
Shortly after being nominated to the federal bench by Republican President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2003, Kravitz won an award from the Connecticut Council on Freedom aaa hotel discounts montana of Information. The council honored Kravitz, who had represented news organizations aaa hotel discounts montana in several aaa hotel discounts montana cases, for arguing for free speech and freedom of information, often without pay.
Kravitz oversaw a diverse mix of criminal and civil cases at the New Haven federal courthouse. He also helped review and change federal court rules for most of the past decade. In 2007, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. appointed Kravitz as chairman of the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules.
This year, he sentenced philanthropist Anne Bass' butler to 20 years in prison in August for trying aaa hotel discounts montana to extort money from her. In April, he ruled that New Haven officials could remove Occupy New Haven protesters aaa hotel discounts montana from the city Green, in a case involving property rights versus free speech rights.
In a free speech case that made national news in 2009, Kravitz ruled that Burlington school officials acted within their rights when they disciplined student Avery Doninger for an Internet posting aaa hotel discounts montana she wrote off school grounds.
"I thought he was very, very smart. He was very engaging," Schoenhorn said. "He was what I would term a conservative legal mind. He embodied the traits that the Bush administration was looking for in conservative jurists. But he also had compassion."
Kravitz was the second federal judge in Connecticut to die this year. Judge Peter Dorsey died in January. With Dorsey's death, Kravitz's illness and another aaa hotel discounts montana judge's promotion, Thompson enlisted help from out-of-state colleagues aaa hotel discounts montana last month to help clear a backlog of civil cases created by a shortage of judges.