SERVANT AND TEACHER: JOSEPH, THE GREAT

St. John's Law Review, Summer 2004 by Castel, P Kevin

On a spring day in 1972, I entered the building at 96 Schermerhorn Street for my first and last time. I was there for an admissions interview and found my way to "The Office," where I met a distinguished gentleman, lanky with dark brown hair and a polite and friendly demeanor. He was old but not ancient. I judged him to be in his mid-30s. The interview seemed to go well. He was more reassuring than intimidating.

I was next to see this man at the podium in an amphitheater classroom on the first floor of the spanking new law school building on the Hillcrest campus. Assistant Dean Bellacosa presided over our orientation and introduced us to names like Hand, Cardozo, FuId, and Prosser. I had a vague recognition of the name Cardozo but not of any of the others. He explained that this was not a mere graduate program but the antechamber of a great and noble profession. We learned that we would be undertaking professional responsibilities transcending the dictates of the marketplace.

A few years back, on a beautiful August day, I visited the law school and noticed a large red and white banner hanging from Belson Hall-"Welcome Back Students!" In the 1970s, law faculties did not go out of their way to display a nurturing attitude toward students, and St. John's was no exception. An Assistant Dean was supposed to be the "hatchet guy"-the administrator in charge of saying "no." In this regard, Assistant Dean Bellacosa failed miserably in conveying a cold, heartless image. He was considered tough but approachable. Where he was unyielding, he could at least empathize-most of the time.1 In my second year, our section-Section A, which included my classmate Professor Vincent C. Alexander-studied Professional Responsibility under Professor Bellacosa. Professor Bellacosa expected his students to be well-prepared and ready to respond. He was not a spoon-feeder and made you think about ethical issues from the perspectives of clients, adversaries, judges, and society-at-large.2

As if he did not have enough other things on his plate, Professor Bellacosa was faculty co-advisor with Professor "Bullet" Bob Parella to the 1975 champion Moot Court team featuring Mary Ann D'Amato, Anton Borovina, Dave Bryan, Mike Linz, Susan Moreinis and Claude Castro (D'Amato, Borovina, and Linz represented St. John's in the National Moot Court Competition, winning Best Brief in the New York Region and second Best Overall-they went on to the final round where their team brief was ranked fourth nationally). Members of the Moot Court Board were called "Clerks of the Moot Court," and the head of the Board was known as the "Chief Clerk." The members reported to Professors Bellacosa and Parella that they thought the term "Clerk" carried insufficient prestige and that henceforth they wanted to be addressed as "Associate Justices" and "Chief Justice" of the Moot Court. What they did not know at the time was that Professor Bellacosa was preparing to enter government service as Chief Clerk of the New York Court of Appeals. While he acceded to the members' request, he reminded them that, on some issues, the Clerk could wield more power than the Judge.

The entire St. John's community took great pride as Mr. Bellacosa gained a statewide reputation while serving as Clerk of the New York Court of Appeals from 1975 to 1983. He was the first Clerk also to hold the position of Counsel to the Court and to sit in on the Court's conferences in which the merits of cases were discussed. In Albany, he supervised three highly significant changes: (1) the transition from an elected Court to an appointed Court;3 (2) the transition to a Court in which most civil appeals are heard through a certiorari process;4 and (3) the creation of a process through which questions could be certified to the Court by a federal appellate court.5 Few would question that these were among the most significant procedural changes in the entire life of the Court.

Mr. Bellacosa's success at the Court of Appeals led to his appointment first as Chair of the Sentencing Guidelines Commission in 1983 and then in 1985 as Chief Administrative Judge and head of New York's Office of Court Administration ("OCA"). At OCA, Chief Administrative Judge Bellacosa worked closely with various constituencies who supported or opposed the transformation of our trial courts from tribunals in which a case could pass through the hands of several judges as successive motions were made to a system in which a single judge supervised a case from commencement to conclusion. Judge Bellacosa had a major hand in planning and implementing the Individual Assignment System, which was roughly comparable to orchestrating Sweden's 1967 transition from driving automobiles on the left-hand side of the road to the right-hand side. Only a lawyer who practiced in the days of the Part I Motion Calendar in Supreme Court, New York County, with more than 300 motions on the calendar for a single day, can appreciate the significance of the change.

In 1987, Judge Bellacosa was appointed by Governor Mario Cuomo to the New York Court of Appeals.6 It was not long before Judge Bellacosa became recognized as a solid and smart judge with excellent common sense. A tangible mark of the esteem in which he continues to be held is the frequent citation to him by name as the author of an opinion, a stratagem long employed by lawyers and judges who seek to bolster the persuasiveness of a line of reasoning by emphasizing the identity of its author. His writings on and off the bench have been cited in more than 400 articles in journals and law reviews around the country.7 Courts in other jurisdictions have cited and then followed his dissenting opinions, particularly in the arena of criminal law and procedure.8 Warm words of praise are wonderful, but having one's dissenting opinion adopted by another court is the highest and most sincere praise an appellate judge can receive.