[1] Together with attorney Mark Zaid he helped pass the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act[2] to change the laws of sovereign immunity and enable suits against foreign sovereignties who participated in financing or planning terrorist activity.
[1] He led families of 9/11 victims "to file suit against various ''interests'' associated with the government of Saudi Arabia, alleging that they helped finance Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network".
[3] Born in a refugee camp in Uzbekistan in 1945 after World War II, Gerson, a child of Holocaust survivors,[4] immigrated illegally to the United States under a false identity.
"[5] In addition to being a private practice lawyer, he was an author, a professor at George Mason University, a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals in the OSI of the United States Department of Justice[4] and deputy assistant attorney general under president Ronald Reagan.
[6] His books include The Price of Terror: The History-Making Struggle for Justice After Pan Am 103 (2001, co-authored by Jerry Adler),[7] Privatizing Peace: From Conflict to Security (2002, co-authored by Nat J. Colletta), The Kirkpatrick Mission: Diplomacy Without Apology, America at the United Nations 1981-1985 (1991), Israel, The West Bank and International Law (1978), and his memoir, published post-humously, Lies That Matter: A federal prosecutor and child of Holocaust survivors, tasked with stripping US citizenship from aged Nazi collaborators, finds himself caught in the middle (2021).