Kenneth Feinberg, Special Master

This morning, I turned on CSPAN-2, looking for Condoleeza Rice's Sept. 11th commission testimony. I missed that spectacle, but instead found a much more interesting talk by Kenneth Feinberg, Special Master of the September 11th Fund, which Congress established to compensate victims of September 11th. Feinberg is an immensely engaging person, and he talked at length about the novelty of his position.

Feinberg was solely responsible for calculating the economic value of people's prospective lives and compensating the survivors, but only after accounting for insurance proceeds (a novel mix of tort law and social welfare safety net concepts), and together with his staff, devising his own administrative regulations. The position was fraught with potential disasters, but he was aided by the almost complete absence of fraudulent claims (!!!!) and widespread public and Congressional support.

Feinberg concluded by dwelling on two points:

How is it possible to compensate certain people more than others for premature deaths? It sounds terribly unjust, yet juries do exactly the same thing every day, and;

How is it just to compensate Sept. 11th victims, but then not compensate Daniel Pearl's widow, or Oklahoma City survivors, or anyone else who doesn't qualify for this particular fund?

Feinberg's talk was truly wonderful, a real gem of a speech, which touched on immutable principles of justice as applied to a single horrible disaster. I remember when I first heard of the September 11th Fund, I thought it was a disaster on wheels, a big rolling advertisement for fraud. Thanks in large measure to Feinberg's solid character, though, the Fund appears to be a success. May we never have need for such a fund in the future, but if we do, let us pray we have more such people to administer it.