Michael Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor, born in New York in 1949, has been practicing law in New York for more than thirty years. A member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, he is now a solo practitioner and admitted to practice in the New York State courts, the United States District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In 1969 Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's innovative New College, then a three-year program supported by the Ford Foundation.

In 1972 Gaynor received his doctorate of jurisprudence degree from St. John's University School of Law. There he was in the top 10% of his class. He won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote an article on the Pentagon Papers case for the Law Review and two articles on obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer, in addition to overseeing the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law, then called "The Quarterly Survey of New York Practice."

The day after graduating from St. John's Law School, Gaynor joined Fulton, Walter & Duncombe, a Manhattan law firm with offices at Rockefeller Center. Gaynor worked with that firm, first as an associate and then as a partner, through 1996. He engaged in general practice, involving corporate law, federal and state litigation, mergers and acquisitions, trusts and estates law, tax law, and other areas of law, on behalf of the firm's clients, including International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., Carvel Corporation, Tenneco Inc., UniWorld Group, Inc., and Palisades Geophysical Institute, Inc., as well as substantial charitable organizations, other corporations and individuals.

In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed the law firm of Gaynor & Bass. For more than five years, Gaynor & Bass conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed upon appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The United States Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation. Bass, as a solo practioner, had filed the case on behalf of a group of freelance writers, and the United States District Court had granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment on liability.

He is a regular columnist at www.MichNews.com, www.renewamerica.us, www.webcommentary.com and www.postchronicle.com and has contributed to www.catholiconline.com, www.capitolhillcoffeehouse.com, www.yourcatholicvoice.com, www.intellectualconservative.com, www.starrjournal.com, www.therant.us, www.peoplepolitical.com and www.salon.com.

Articles by this Author

Obama's Fatal Weakness With Whites

By Michael Gaynor
Published 05/23/2008
Politics
Rating: Unrated

Rookie United States Senators and current Democrat frontrunner Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. rightly took a big hit with white voters after the media focused the nation on his relationships with the likes of Rev. Jeremiah A. "God damn America" Wright, Jr. and William "I bombed the Pentagon and wish I'd done more" Ayers and a videotape of Obama telling the elite as a closed-door San Francisco fundraiser that small town Americans clung to religion and guns out of bitter over their economic circumstances was made public.