Special Commission on the Future of the New York State Courts

— SECTION FOUR —
PAST PROPOSALS, AND THE MANY CALLS FOR REFORM
Decades of Ideas
Our articulation of the court reform issue is, of course,
not new. For many generations, commissions such as ours, as
well as legislative panels and other groups, have decried the
structure of the New York courts, and have proposed a
remarkably consistent slate of potential reforms. These include
proposals from the Tweed <strong>Commission</strong> in the 1950s; the
Dominick and Vance <strong>Commission</strong>s in the 1970s; a legislative
plan that received first passage in the Legislature in 1986; and a
comprehensive reform package proposed by Chief Judge Kaye in
1997 that received resounding support throughout the state.
While these proposals differed in their details, all identified the
same problems and, in broad strokes, proposed the same
solutions: a consolidation of the trial courts and the addition of
an appellate department. Yet, after all this time, the structure of
the New York State courts remains largely unchanged.
We have studied these past reform efforts and they have
informed our analysis of the current system and our
recommendations. The most significant of these efforts are
examined briefly in this section.
“It is our profound hope that
after decades of proposals, the
time has finally come to end
the waste and inefficiency generated
by the New York courts’
outmoded and fragmented
trial-court structure.”
– Westchester County
Association, January
2007
We observe at the outset that the failure to achieve reform
over the last fifty years does not, in our view, reflect a lack of
popular support or some substantive deficiency in past
recommendations. Rather, we believe that prior efforts failed
due to lack of political will and the necessary momentum – a will
and momentum that we believe can and should now be developed
throughout our state.
A Court System for the Future, February 2007 49