Hidden in the state budget passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Hochul was the creation of 10 new Civil Court judgeships spread across all five boroughs. Even if the new judicial seats were needed to accommodate a growing caseload, everything about this was wrong.
First, it was done in secret (and we’ll get to why), as there was no bill and no legislation pending that we’ve been able to find. The Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t know anything about it until after the budget passed, which points to Speaker Carl Heastie and the Assembly as the responsible parties, or actually irresponsible parties. But secrecy in lawmaking and judgemaking isn’t new.
Next, the 10-year elected judgeships are to be filled this November, but there isn’t sufficient time for open primaries, so the local party bosses will hand select the candidates. And that means whomever the local Democratic bosses pick are guaranteed to become judges. Alas, icing out the voters isn’t new either. They did it just last year with 12 new Civil Court spots, as well as with 12 new Family Court judges outside the city, none of which had primaries.
Next (and this is a new one and likely why it was secret to even insiders), the 10 new judgeships are not borough-wide seats as has been the norm for decades, but the old, incredibly malapportioned and otherwise unconstitutional Municipal Court districts, districts that stretch back to 1915.
So only favored bosses in favored Municipal Court districts will now be doing the picking and unlike for the countywide seats, the Democratic Party screening committees (be they weak or strong, independent or not) are not mandatory.
There are 28 of these districts and they are very out of whack among the boroughs and within the boroughs. Manhattan has 10, but the Bronx has only two. The population of Manhattan’s 8th District (East Harlem) has only 36,628 registered voters, but the 4th District in Queens (covering eastern Queens) is ten-fold the size, with 357,352 voters.
When the Municipal Court was created in 1915 with nine districts in Manhattan, two in the Bronx, seven in Brooklyn, four in Queens and two on Staten Island, cases were handled in those districts. In the decades that followed a few new districts were added with one each in Manhattan and Brooklyn and two in Queens.
In 1961, the public voted to amend the state Constitution to merge the Municipal Court with the City Court into the new Civil Court. City Court had judges elected on a borough-wide basis and the new Civil Court absorbed both.
In Civil Court previous distinctions about districts and boroughs were dispensed with. Civil Court was a citywide court, with judges, no matter where or how they were elected, assigned anywhere in the city. Judicial candidates could live anywhere in the city and run for any Civil Court seat, district or borough.
For a few years, until 1968, the Legislature added both district and borough-wide seats, but since then, only borough-wide judgeships have been added, as the vastly unequal districts were just leftovers that kept hanging around. No one thought that new judgeships would added to the districts. Until now.
As we said, everything about this is rotten and it stinks as rotten things do.
