Special Commission on the Future of the New York State Courts

— SECTION ONE —
THE CURRENT STRUCTURE:
AN ORGANIZATIONAL MORASS
New York State has one of the finest judiciaries in the
nation. The state’s 1,203 judges successfully resolve over 3.7
million cases each year. 3 This judiciary is presided over by a
Chief Judge who has been recognized for many years as an
innovative leader of national stature, and is administered by an
organization that is a model of judicial administration for the rest
of the country.
The problem is that these judges and administrators are
forced by antiquated provisions in our state Constitution to work
within an organizational structure that is the most complicated,
inefficient and costly in the nation. Our court system has a
Byzantine organizational chart that is not the result of any
coherent analysis or business plan, but is the vestige of a
nineteenth century patchwork in which a variety of idiosyncratic
courts were allowed to proliferate despite overlapping and
inconsistent jurisdictions. Over time, court administrators have
attempted to address the problems caused by this structure by
applying temporary and piecemeal fixes that further complicate
an already fragmented system.
“The current [court] structure
cannot be defended. It is inefficient,
costly to litigants and
generally not conducive to the
swift and sure administration
of justice.”
– Atlantic Legal
Foundation, March
2005
The organization of New York’s appellate courts is also
antiquated and inefficient. The current structure – which divides
the state into four appellate departments – was set up in the 1890s,
when the state’s population was a small fraction of what it is today,
and when the population was more evenly distributed. Today,
more than a century later, one of these departments, the Second
Department, has grown to include half the state’s population. As
a consequence, it now bears a highly disproportionate share of the
state’s appellate caseload, resulting in enormous backlogs, delays,
and unnecessary costs to all concerned.
3
These numbers do not include cases and judges in the state’s 1,277
Town and Village Justice Courts which, as noted above, are operationally distinct
from the state-funded courts that are overseen by OCA.
A Court System for the Future, February 2007 15