
Lewis M. Steel
About
LEWIS M. STEEL works on a wide range of class actions and individual cases, generally involving racial and sexual discrimination matters as well as labor law violations. Presently, as a member of an Outten & Golden team, he has been ligating class action claims challenging the invalidated use by employers of criminal records to deny applicants jobs, including the ground breaking Gonzalez v. Pritzker settlement against the United States Census Bureau, for which Mr. Steel and the team received the 2017 Public Justice Award. Mr. Steel has also been listed in Best Lawyers in America for more than twenty years.
Before joining Outten & Golden, Mr. Steel handled a wide range of civil rights cases involving housing and zoning discrimination, as well as police brutality and criminal cases. He served as co-lead counsel in the Rubin Carter/John Artis case for which he was honored by the New York Criminal Bar Association in 2000. Moreover, New York Law School has awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree for his civil rights work and he has been an adjunct professor of law there.
Mr. Steel’s precedent-setting employment discrimination decisions include Sumitomo Shoji America, Inc. v. Avagliano, 457 U.S. 176, which established that American subsidiaries of foreign corporations must obey American civil rights laws. In the Sumitomo case and other employment discrimination class actions he has negotiated far-reaching settlements and monitored the companies’ performance. He now works on a range of class action cases involving sexual and racial discrimination, overtime claims, and tipping issues. Mr. Steel recently negotiated a ground-breaking settlement of pay, promotion, and retaliation claims for a class of African-American and Hispanic New York City Department of Parks and Recreation employees.
Mr. Steel graduated from Harvard College in 1958 and from New York Law School in 1963, where he was the Editor in Chief of the Law Review.
Bar Admissions & Professional Activities
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Mr. Steel is admitted to practice law only in New York.
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Mr. Steel is admitted to the following federal courts: The United States District Courts for the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York; and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Third Circuit.
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Mr. Steel, who began his career in 1964 on the legal staff of the NAACP, is a past president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and has served on the Board of Directors of the New York County Lawyers Association.
Videos
Speaking Engagements
Mr. Steel has lectured, appeared on television, and written on a wide variety of employment discrimination and civil rights topics.
2021
- Speaker: "The 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion and Aftermath: Reflections on a Pivotal Episode in Post-Civil Rights America," University of South Carolina History Department, University of South Carolina
Publications & Articles
70 million Americans - one in every three adults in the United States - has a criminal record of some sort. for many of these people, however, the...
Cancel culture. Cancel culture. The right wing trumpets it so many times it rings in my ears. Freedom of speech, the right's mouth pieces claim, is...
If the events of the past few weeks have shown us anything, it's that - like Black lives - words matter. Both spoken and in writing, the language we...
Lewis M Steel, Institute for Community Studies, Queens College, 1969
Lewis M. Steel with Beau Friedlander, Thomas Dunne Books St. Martin's Press, 2016
Lewis M. Steel Esq., Verdict (Vol. 25 No.2), April 2019
Lewis Steel, Co-Author with Tim Bakken, New York Law School Law Review, Volume 56, 2011/12
Awards & Recognition
- Mr. Steel has been listed in Best Lawyers in America since 1989.