In spite of opposition from a number of American Holocaust survivors, a law professor is likely to get $3.1 million in legal fees for his work in administering one of the largest World War II-related court settlements.

The dispute over whether the law professor, Burt Neuborne of New York University, should receive any compensation for his work has been full of vitriol, with a group of survivors accusing Mr. Neuborne of promising to work pro bono and then breaking his word and billing them for $4.1 million.

In a decision yesterday, a federal magistrate judge wrote that Mr. Neuborne has “done exemplary work to help achieve the historic righting of a terrible wrong,” and he recommended that Mr. Neuborne receive $3.1 million for nearly 7,000 hours of work over a period of seven years. The decision by the magistrate judge, James Orenstein, requires approval from a federal district judge.

Mr. Neuborne, a leading civil rights attorney, was one of several lawyers who sued Swiss banks in the mid-1990s, accusing them of plundering the accounts of Hitler’s victims. He has since played a leading role in distributing the $1.25 billion settlement with the Swiss banks to nearly 400,000 victims of Nazi Germany.

Mr. Neuborne had pledged that he would litigate the lawsuits pro bono. The question is whether he remained pro bono after the 1999 settlement, when Mr. Neuborne was appointed by a judge to help distribute the settlement to Swiss bank holders, slave laborers, and other victims across the globe.

Magistrate Judge Orenstein chided Mr. Neuborne for failing to make it clearer to survivors that he expected to be paid for the post-settlement work.

Still, the magistrate judge wrote, that while possible, it was unlikely “that a casual observer of Neuborne’s statements over the years could have mistakenly concluded that Neuborne had explicitly foreclosed the possibility that he would seek compensation” for his post-settlement work.

“To be sure, Neuborne cannot escape criticism for the murkiness of such statements,” Magistrate Judge Orenstein wrote.

“You know what, where he criticized me he was right,” Mr. Neuborne told The New York Sun yesterday of the magistrate judge’s decision. “I’ve said to myself, ‘How could I have been so sloppy?’ I have paid for that sloppiness with people who have accused me of lying.”

The ruling drew an angry reaction from survivors who have opposed Mr. Neuborne’s fee request.

“It is making me sick to hear that he is getting that much money,” a survivor of Dachau, Fred Taucher, 74, of Everett, Wash., said in a telephone interview yesterday “That could go to several survivors who are not getting their medications. He made us all believe that he was doing this pro bono.”

For his work in another Holocaust-related suit against German industries, Mr. Neuborne was awarded $4.3 million in legal fees.

The discord between Mr. Neuborne and the American survivors goes deeper than any dispute over legal fees, the magistrate judge suggested in yesterday’s ruling.

Some American survivors have been disappointed with the distribution of the Swiss banks settlement. They say too much money was allotted to Holocaust survivors in the former Soviet Union and not enough to survivors in Israel and America.

Indeed, it is the controversy over distribution “that has caused years of strife among certain of the class members and their lawyers,” Magistrate Judge Orenstein wrote at the beginning of his 104-page decision.

Mr. Neuborne, tasked with defending the distribution formula before appeals courts, became a public symbol of that contentious distribution formula.

In calculating Mr. Neuborne’s fee, Magistrate Judge Orenstein ruled that the lawyer should be paid $450 an hour, less than the $700 Mr. Neuborne requested. Mr. Neuborne’s fee request was originally $4.1 million, but he subsequently raised it to as high as $6.3 million.