Muriel Goode-Trufant confirmed as NYC corporation counsel

Muriel Goode-Trufant was confirmed as New York City corporation counsel by the City Council in a 41-7 vote. Photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit

By Noah Powelson

After 6 months of tensions between the mayor and the City Council, New York City finally has an official and permanent corporation counsel.

Muriel Goode-Trufant, who had already been temporarily serving as acting New York City corporation counsel following her predecessor’s resignation, was permanently confirmed to the position by the New York City Council on Thursday, Dec. 5. Following a brief hearing in November, the City Council voted 41-7 to confirm Goode-Trufant, ending a drawn out and divisive issue that has plagued Mayor Eric Adams for months.

“Muriel Goode-Trufant’s deep legal expertise and decades of experience as a public servant have made her fully prepared to serve our entire city government and help lead New York City forward in her new role as the city’s chief lawyer,” the mayor said. “Thank you to my colleagues in the City Council for their fair and timely consideration of such a supremely qualified and capable nominee.”

A graduate of Temple University School of Law, Goode-Trufant began her career at the New York City Law Department in 1991 as an attorney in the General Litigation Division. She held numerous positions during her time, including the assistant chief of the division, agency’s equal employment opportunity officer and eventually became a chief in the Special Federal Litigation Division. Goode-Trufant became the Law Department’s managing attorney in 2015 and first assistant corporation counsel in 2023.

“It is an honor to serve as New York City’s 82nd corporation counsel and to lead the finest public law office in the country,” Goode-Trufant said. “I thank both Mayor Adams and the City Council for nominating and confirming me for this position. I look forward to continuing my work with the dedicated members of the Law Department, who embody the principles of fairness and justice as they work to further the interests of the city.”

The seven City Council members opposed to Goode-Trufant were all part of the Common Sense Caucus. Queens City Council Members Vicki Paladino and Joann Ariola were among the handful who voted against confirming Goode-Trufant, citing the have issues with the Law Department’s handling of cases involving city employees being terminated for violating vaccine requirements during the pandemic.

“Muriel Goode-Trufant has held back hundreds of experienced and extremely qualified firefighters, teachers, police officers and sanitation workers and thousands of other city workers from returning to their jobs that they love after they won court cases, and she continues to unlawfully have them removed from their jobs time and time again,” Ariola said before the vote to confirm Goode-Trufant. “I cannot support her confirmation, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.”

Goode-Trufant still received a strong majority vote for her confirmation, and will continue in her role as the head of the Law Department, which currently employs around 760 attorneys working on roughly 70,000 active legal cases. The Law Department represents the city in all of its civil matters but also represents individuals or individual offices within city government, including both the mayor and the Council.

The successful confirmation puts an end to a tumultuous process for Adams that began after several federal investigations began to enshroud both him and some of his top advisors.

Syliva Hinds-Radix, the previous corporation counsel, reportedly resigned over disagreements with the mayor over how to handle several of the investigations that had ensnared the administration in scandal.

Goode-Trufant was nominated for the prestigious legal position by Adams in October after Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor and chief of staff to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, withdrew his name from consideration. Mastro, Adams’ first pick for the job, was denounced by a majority of the City Council, and withdrew after enduring a long eight-hour confirmation hearing in September.

In comparison, the confirmation hearing for Goode-Trufant was short and simple, but councilmembers still probed the then nominee how she would handle a legal dispute between the City Council and the mayor. Goode-Trufant was questioned on the mayor’s state of emergency and executive order suspending a City Council law banning the use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails, an order the City Council is now suing Adams over.

Goode-Trufant said she believed the use of an emergency order to skirt around implementing the law was appropriate given the “extraordinarily difficult situation” on Rikers Island. She also said she believed the law would have interfered with an ongoing court order surrounding the city’s management of the jails on Rikers Island stemming from the case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.

“The challenge in that particular circumstance is that everything that is included there is also the subject of longstanding litigation, and there are difficulties that the city faces in that litigation,” Goode-Trufant said during her confirmation hearing. “Separately there are instances where our supervision by the court would have been impacted by the full-throttled enactment of that particular local law, so we had very immediate challenges that we had to face. It was an extraordinarily difficult situation, which persists.”