Special Commission on the Future of the New York State Courts

JSC status, thereby increasing the pool of JSCs and the overall
efficiency of the system, the need to transfer justices from one
part of the state to another should, if anything, be diminished.
Moreover, we believe there is no basis for the concern
that new JSCs will be arbitrarily assigned to areas in which they
have no expertise. To the contrary, when assigning new JSCs to
newly created Supreme Court parts, every effort should be made
to employ the experience of particular judges. For example,
current Family Court judges would become Supreme Court
Justices, but should be concentrated in the Family Division of
the new Supreme Court with jurisdiction over all family-related
proceedings. The same would be true of Surrogate’s Court
judges with respect to the Probate Division of the Supreme Court.
We note, however, that even under the current system it is
commonplace for judges to preside over a wide variety of cases
over the course of a career – judges regularly move from civil to
criminal, from misdemeanors to felonies, and from family to
commercial matters. While a restructured system would preserve
the expertise of judges in particular disciplines, we also expect
that a new system would be flexible and permit the reassignment
of judges – not arbitrarily, but where changes make sense for the
courts, judges and litigants alike.
More fundamentally, we believe that court administrators
have acted in good faith to this point and would continue to do
so. In studying the now thirty-year history of OCA, we have
found that even its most vocal critics have not accused court
administrators of reassigning judges in bad faith. Moreover, we
believe that court restructuring would create a system that will
run more efficiently and be easier to administer. In other words,
court reform should allow OCA to function more efficiently and
with the same degree of good faith as it has in the past.
We note that a number of past proposals have included a
grandfathering provision to prevent arbitrary reassignment of
existing Supreme Court Justices – both geographically and as
between specialized divisions. Alternatively, others have
proposed a mechanism through which judges could appeal their
reassignments by OCA. While we do not believe it necessary to
provide for such mechanisms, we recognize that these options
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A Court System for the Future, February 2007