As New York City’s chief legal officer, he drafted a model public campaign financing law and fought bias against women in private clubs.
Peter L. Zimroth, who for eight years as a court-appointed monitor oversaw a sharp decline in the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk strategy without a consequent increase in crime, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Estelle Parsons, the Broadway and film actress.
As the city’s corporation counsel, its chief legal officer, under Mayor Edward I. Koch from 1987 to 1989, Mr. Zimroth was instrumental in the creation of the city’s voluntary system of public campaign financing, a model that was widely emulated by local governments.
For candidates who qualified for matching government funds, the program generally capped overall spending and slashed the legal limit on individual contributions to $6,000 from as much as $100,000.
“I don’t know if there’ll be any less corruption,” Mr. Zimroth told The New York Times in 1987, “but over the long run there would be less entrenchment by the establishment, and that is bound to be healthy.”
A corporate lawyer and former prosecutor, Mr. Zimroth was appointed in 2013 by Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court in New York to oversee reforms in the police department’s boundless stop-question-and-frisk crime-control strategy. Judge Scheindlin had ruled that the tactic violated the constitutional rights of Black and Hispanic people as a “policy of indirect racial profiling.”
The police were making hundreds of thousands of stops annually and were found to be disproportionately singling out Black and Hispanic New Yorkers on the merest suspicion of wrongdoing.
While the judge declined to halt the tactic outright, she named Mr. Zimroth to monitor racial disparities in the number of stops as well as reforms in the department’s training and procedures, including the use of body cameras for some officers on patrol. He served in that position until last year.
Judge Scheindlin, who has since retired from the bench, said of Mr. Zimroth in an email, “Besides setting standards, he has increased transparency that has allowed the victims of stops to understand who stopped them and the basis for the stop and the right to challenge the action if necessary.”
She added, “His reports to the court have been extremely enlightening and have tracked the progress in reducing the number of stops without a related increase in crime.”
Mr. Zimroth’s role as monitor capped a career of both challenging and defending local officials, including in several other racially-charged cases when he was corporation counsel.
As corporation counsel, he argued in 1989 that Staten Island, where white people predominated, could not secede from the four other boroughs — where minority groups collectively constituted a majority of the population — without the city government’s permission. The judgment was ultimately upheld by leaders of the State Legislature.
He fought what he acknowledged was a losing battle to preserve the Board of Estimate, a quasi-legislative body with broad powers over spending, contracts and the use of land. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the board violated the principle of one-person, one-vote because each of the boroughs was represented equally on the board despite wide disparities in their populations.
He fended off challenges to a 1984 city law requiring the admission of women to large private clubs that play an important role in the city’s business and professional life.
“They have agreed with us to admit women on the same basis as men and to treat women guests the same as men guests,” he said in 1989, when the last holdout, the New York Athletic Club, capitulated.
And he filed an amicus brief whose argument was adopted by the New York State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, in a landmark opinion that secured the right of a longtime same-sex partner of a deceased tenant of a rent-controlled apartment to be considered a member of the family and therefore remain as a tenant.
“He was a superb lawyer, oral advocate and wonderful colleague for whom intellectual honesty always informed his advocacy positions,” Richard D. Emery, a civil liberties lawyer who successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Board of Estimate, said of Mr. Zimroth in an email. “He was fair, balanced and superbly articulate for his causes.”
Peter Lenard Zimroth was born on Jan. 11, 1943, in Brooklyn. His father, Sol, owned a dry cleaning store and later sold insurance and mutual funds. His mother, Ruth (Sadowsky) Zimroth, was a homemaker and later a bookkeeper.
He was raised in the Bensonhurst section, where his grandfather, watching Jackie Robinson’s history-making performances for the Dodgers on television with him, urged Peter to fight injustice wherever he found it. (In recent years Mr. Zimroth successfully defended a Muslim mosque in Bridgewater, N.J., that had sued the township for ruling that a proposed mosque violated local zoning restrictions.)
After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island, Mr. Zimroth, at 16, enrolled in Columbia College and received a bachelor’s degree in 1963. He then attended Yale Law School, where he was editor of The Yale Law Journal before graduating in 1966.
He then clerked for Judge David L. Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and then for Associate Justice Abe Fortas of the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Zimroth was a professor at the New York University School of Law; represented Detective David Durk, a whistle-blower who testified before the Knapp Commission investigating corruption in the N.Y.P.D. in the 1970s; and served as an assistant federal prosecutor in Manhattan and as chief assistant to the Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1983, he is survived by his son, Abraham; his stepdaughters Martha Gehman and Abbie Britton; his sister, Alice Kelly; four grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.
From 1990 to 2015, Mr. Zimroth was a partner with the law firm of Arnold & Porter. He was a founding director of the Center on Civil Justice at the N.Y.U. law school. Earlier this year, the school’s Center on the Administration of Criminal Law was renamed in his honor.
“I’ve been a prosecutor, a defense lawyer, a teacher; I’ve been an administrator,” he told The Times in 1987. “And I really feel very strongly about using the law as an instrument for social good. That’s why I became a lawyer.”
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