The Los Angeles Times
December  05, 2001
By Michael Krikorian

Armenian Genocide Victims Win Court Ruling

U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder denied a motion by New York Life Insurance Co. to void the law, which permitted a 1999 class-action suit to go forward in California. New York Life argued that policies written between 1895 and 1915, payable in English pounds or French francs, had no place in a Los Angeles court room and should be heard in England or France.

Snyder ruled that with hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians living in California, enforcing such a requirement would be “fundamentally unfair.”

Snyder’s ruling “bolsters the claims Holocaust victims are relying on in California,” said attorney William Shernoff, who is one of the plaintiff’s lawyers in the Armenian suit and in Holocaust class-action suits related to World War II.