State has ‘dire need’ for more judges, city bar says
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The New York City Bar Association in a recent report found that the state’s constitution has led to a shortage of Supreme Court justices throughout the state. Eagle file photo by David Brand
By Jacob Kaye
New York State has a “dire need” for more trial court judges, according to a recently released report from the New York City Bar Association.
In the report, which was released earlier this month, the city bar association calls on the New York State legislature to work toward repealing the state’s constitutionally prescribed cap on the number of judges that can be elected to the state’s Supreme Courts.
Hamstrung by the state’s constitution, New York’s courts have struggled over the decades to keep up with the state’s growing population, the report alleges. Judges have been stretched thin, backlogs have grown and justice has become more difficult to obtain as a result, according to the NYCBA.
“Throughout its history, New York State has struggled with an insufficient number of judicial seats necessitating stopgap measures that have only resulted in a complicated, overworked, and confusing court system that fails to provide justice to all,” the report, titled “Repeal the Cap and Do the Math,” reads. “The dire need for additional judges overall is a function of the chronic failure to provide adequate judicial resources to New York’s Unified Court System.”
While a number of legislative measures have been proposed – and some, passed into law – to increase the number of judges working in the state’s Supreme Court, ultimately, the primary way to address the shortage in the judiciary is to pass a constitutional amendment eliminating the state’s cap on judges, the NYCBA says.
“On a fundamental level, the lack of judicial resources stems largely from the constitutionally prescribed method by which the New York State Legislature determines the number of justices that can be elected to the state’s trial court of general jurisdiction — the New York State Supreme Court,” the report reads. “It is undisputed that the constitutional cap on the number of elected Supreme Court Justices must be eliminated.”
Originally enacted in 1846 – and later amended in 1961 – the state’s constitution sets the number of Supreme Court justices at one per 50,000 residents of a given judicial district.
“The effect of such a formula is to cap the number of legislatively authorized Supreme Court seats within each judicial district, leaving the Legislature powerless to authorize additional seats to meet the growing and particular needs of the courts in such districts,” the report reads. “Thus, the purely population-based ‘constitutional cap’ has proven over-simplistic, outdated, and unworkable.”
Though the legislature is currently unable to drastically change the number of Supreme Court justices in a particular district, they have been able to increase the number of justices in the state over time.
The formula currently allows for 43 elected Supreme Court justices in the 11th Judicial District, which covers Queens County. Six years ago, there were only 39 Supreme Court justices allowed in the district, per the constitution. However, the legislature was able to make statutory changes, adding an additional justice in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022.
Statewide, there were 14 Supreme Court justices added in 2022 and in 2021, three added in 2019 and four added in 2018. Additional legislation has been passed and signed into law to increase the number of judges in the city’s Family Courts.
In 2021, Queens State Senator Leroy Comrie was one of the sponsors of the bill to create an additional justice in the borough. He told the Eagle that year that while he was happy the bill passed, he was also slightly let down.
“We’re going to get one additional one in Queens, unfortunately, I was hoping for more, but they claimed that because of the census numbers...we're only getting one more,” Comrie told the Eagle in 2021. “We need experienced judges, especially in a system where it could take six months to eight months to get a hearing. We need as many judges as we can get right now.”
The lawmaker lamented that while more justices is always better, a single justice may not do much to greatly improve case backlogs in the borough.
“It's important that we try to clean up this backlog,” Comrie said. “I think the next fight is to expand the amount of judges all together. Hopefully we can address that next year.”
But that bill has yet to be pursued by the legislature. But according to the NYCBA, the need for a constitutional change has only become more apparent in recent years.
“The situation has become even more critical in light of the impact of the COVID pandemic’s economic fallout on the courts,” the report said. “Cuts in judicial resources promise to tax an already overburdened judiciary beset with backlogs preceding COVID, such as long waits for decisions on motions or trial dates when both parties are ready.”
“In this era of metrics, the people of New York State are entitled to a modern, flexible, evidence-based method of assessing the state’s judicial needs, as is the case in many other states and the federal judiciary,” the report continued.
Currently, when there is a need for additional judges in Supreme Court, judges from lower courts are named acting Supreme Court justices by the Office of Court Administration.
In the report, the NYCBA says that by pulling judges from one court to better staff another creates a “ripple effect that has impacted the entire New York court system.”
“Specifically, to address the lack of resources at the Supreme Court level, the Office of Court Administration has long resorted to adopting makeshift measures that involve designating judges from other courts to sit on the Supreme Court on an ‘acting’ basis,” the report reads. “Not only has this [robbing Peter to pay Paul’ approach depleted these other courts of judicial resources, it has created a de facto permanent and large class of ‘Acting Supreme Court Justices,’ sitting in a court other than the one to which they were either elected by the people or appointed by the relevant appointing authority.”
In 2022, there were a dozen acting Supreme Court judges serving in Queens County Supreme Court, Criminal Term and one serving in the borough’s Civil Term.
Statewide, there were 317 acting Supreme Court judges in 2022.
A spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration declined to comment on the NYCBA’s report.
In addition to creating a constitutional amendment to repeal the state’s cap on Supreme Court justices, the NYCBA made a number of other recommendations that they claim will result in a better staffed judiciary.
The bar association recommended that the legislature pass a bill that would codify a mandatory and regular assessment of the courts’ specific needs. Currently, the legislature assesses the state’s judicial needs every 10 years alongside the release of the census, however, the city bar association claims that that review is not always completed.
The bar association also recommends that there be more detailed and frequent reporting on the judiciary compiled by the chief administrative judge, so as to better aid the legislature in their own assessment of the courts.
The NYCBA also said that they believe the legislature should codify a system for assessing the judicial needs of each of the state’s courts. That system should not only include population, but also the courts’ caseloads, the complexity of the cases that come before the courts and the number of a courts’ unrepresented litigants.
Lastly, the bar association recommended that the legislature make an effort to boost the number of judges in courts other than the state’s Supreme Courts. Only the state’s Supreme Courts’ judicial numbers are defined by the constitution.
