Queens to get at least three new judges

Governor Kathy Hochul last week signed a bill that will create at least three new judicial positions in Queens, and another 25 throughout the state. File photo by Mike Groll/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul

By Jacob Kaye

The governor last week signed a bill that will add over two dozen judges to benches across the Empire State, including three in Queens.

Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law that adds 28 judges to Family and Civil Court benches throughout New York.

Under the law, New York City will be the recipient of a dozen new Civil Court judges. Three each will be assigned to Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. Staten Island will not receive any new judges.

The bill also creates four new Family Court judicial positions.

Hochul, who is separately pursuing a change to the state’s constitution that will increase the number of Supreme Court justices in New York, said that the new law will go a long way toward helping the court system eat away at its backlog of cases.

“Civil and family courts adjudicate some of the most sensitive issues New Yorkers face, and for too long, backlogs and delays have inhibited their ability to function effectively,” the governor said. “This legislation gives our courts the tools to tackle the case backlog and carry out the fair and efficient justice system New Yorkers deserve.”

In addition to the 12 Civil Court and four Family Court positions created in New York City, the law creates one new Family Court position in Cayuga, Chenango, Cortland, Erie, Jefferson, Rensselaer, Rockland and Westchester counties.

It also adds two Family Court judges to both Suffok and Nassau counties.

The new Civil Court judges in the five boroughs will be elected positions, with elections coming as soon as this November. The bill, which goes into effect immediately, does not make mention of primary elections but says the positions “shall be filled by election at the November 5, 2024 election, for a term to commence on the first day of January 2025.”

Like elections for State Supreme Court judicial positions, the candidates will be selected by political parties to run on a party line.

The parties will have to act fast to find candidates. The process for selecting Supreme Court candidates for this year’s upcoming general election has already begun in Queens. Both the Queens County Democratic Party and the Queens County Republican Party will hold their judicial conventions, the event at which Supreme Court and now Civil Court candidates will be selected, in early August.

The Queens County Democratic Party did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

The bill, which was sponsored by State Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Brad Hoylman-Sigal, came after the Senate held a hearing on the state of New York’s “broken” Family Court system.

Throughout the November 2023 hearing, attorneys, court workers, judges, parents and others painted a bleak picture of the courts, which are often overburdened and have, for decades, been under-resourced.

“Some of the most important and intimate legal matters go through our Family Court system but lately, due to a lack of resources, our state’s Family Court system has fallen into a state of disarray,” Hoylman-Sigal said last week in a statement. “Last fall, the New York State Senate held a hearing on the crisis in New York State’s Family Court to detail these concerns and consider possible solutions. One of the many valuable ideas to come out of this hearing, and the subsequent report published by my office, was the desperate need to increase the number of Family Court judges which could help address the thousands of backlogged cases in the system.”

“I am hopeful that this increase in judgeships will allow more children and families to have their cases heard, and seek justice, in a timely manner,” he added.

Though he didn’t testify, Chief Judge Rowan Wilson attended the November hearing and since taking office a little over a year ago, has said that reforming Family Court is among his administration’s top priorities.

Wilson’s top deputy, Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas, told the Eagle last year during a wide-ranging interview that he believed “Family Court is a problem.”

“The bottom line is, there are problems there that are attributable to a lack of resources,” he said.

Wilson reiterated his commitment to reforming the court last week after the governor signed the bill into law.

“Addressing the needs of families in distress is one of the highest priorities of the New York State Unified Court System, and we applaud Governor Hochul and the legislature for their leadership on this issue,” Wilson said.

“Creating these new judgeships across the State, together with the augmentation of resources required to serve our families, will greatly enhance our ongoing efforts to improve the lives of children and families and to ensure that individuals appearing in Family Court receive the fair, thoughtful and expeditious delivery of justice that they deserve,” he added.

The bill signed into law last week is not the only effort Hochul has taken in recent months to grow the judiciary.

Both the governor and the state legislature have been supporting of a piece of legislation called the “No Cap Act” that proposes a constitutional amendment to remove the state’s constitutionally-mandated cap on the amount of Supreme Court justices each of the state’s judicial districts can have on their respective bench.

Lawmakers say that the population-based formula used to calculate the maximum number of Supreme Court justices each district can have is outdated, having last been adjusted in 1961 when New York’s population was around 2 million people smaller than it is in 2024. Without enough Supreme Court justices to meet the demand of any given judicial district, backlogs have mounted throughout the state, the lawmakers and governor contended.

The legislature passed the bill in the final days of its lawmaking session in June but because it’s crafted as a constitutional amendment, the legislature will have to again pass it next year and then voters will have to approve it during an election in order for it to become law.

Despite the unifying appeal of the bill between the legislature and governor, the bill has one notable enemy – Supreme Court justices.

While the justices don’t deny that they need more colleagues in a number of counties throughout the state, they claim that the No Cap bill is far from the solution to their problem.

Instead, they claim the bill will adversely affect the bench, making it less diverse and, in some counties, more vacant.

“That bill is not going to get us more judges,” Queens Supreme Court Justice Carmen Velasquez, who serves as the president of the Supreme Court Justices’ Association of the City of New York, previously told the Eagle.

On Friday, Velasquez celebrated the passage of the bill creating more Civil Court and Family Court judges. She said that she believes that by addressing the backlog on the lower courts, the Supreme Courts will also have the opportunity to bite into their backlogs.

“The legislature is really tackling what the problem is, and that's the courts that we have the most backlog, which is the Family Court,” she said.

Despite her pleasure with the bill, Velasquez said she doesn’t believe it or bills like it are necessarily an alternative to the No Cap bill. That’s because the bills increasing the number of judges in specific counties don’t create a unified method for growing the judiciary, instead only addressing the needs on an ad hoc basis, she said.

“At the end of the day, what is the procedure?” Velasquez said.