INAUGURAL HON. JOSEPH W. BELLACOSA DISTINGUISHED JURIST-IN-RESIDENCE

St. John's Law Review, Fall 2007 by Kaye, Judith S

This lecture begins with a tribute to the students, faculty, and administration here at St. John's, who have given me a truly remarkable and memorable day, crammed from beginning to end with thoughtful, stimulating questions and conversations: about justice, about lawyers and courts, and, in particular, about the Court of Appeals.1 And I am of course most grateful to the catalyst for this special day, my beloved former Court of Appeals colleague and forever friend, Judge Joseph Bellacosa.

You have no more devoted alumnus. Indeed, in all his transmogrifications-lawyer, Clerk of the Court of Appeals, Chief Administrative Judge of the State of New York, Judge of the Court of Appeals, Dean of St. John's University School of Law, Professor, Commission Chair, Trustee, author, commentator, colleague, friend, and sports fan-Joseph W. Bellacosa is one of a kind. He is a scholar, profound thinker, prodigious researcher, a facile writer in any language, and downright fun. His wonderful traits are numerous: abundant talent, boundless energy, warmth and exuberance, devotion to family and friends, strong moral fiber, wisdom, diligence, and humility.

Judge Bellacosa spent twenty-five years at the Court of Appeals, in two installments-in two positions-with perfect attendance throughout.

Lured from the Law School to Albany as Clerk of the Court, he was without question a trailblazer from the start. He transformed the management, organization, and staffing of the Court of Appeals, enormously improving efficiency and bringing us into the twenty-first century years before it actually arrived. His many innovations continue to enhance and streamline our operations to this day.2 Regrettably for me, one of his first acts after I arrived on the bench in September 1983 was to leave the Court to return to teaching. I always took that personally.

But fortunately for all of us, Judge Bellacosa returned to the court system in 1985 as Chief Administrator of the Courts, months later becoming Chief Administrative Judge. During his two years in that role, in addition to managing the day-to-day operations of our vast court system, he oversaw statewide implementation of the Individual Assignment System for trial court dockets, which-like so many other reforms he introduced-persists to this day.

With his appointment as Associate Judge of the Court of Appeals by Governor Mario Cuomo in January 1987, Judge Bellacosa began the second installment of his quarter century at the Court of Appeals. I was fortunate to have had the pleasure of his company on the Court until he left in 2000 for St. John's Law School.

As a Court of Appeals Judge, his extraordinary contribution to the jurisprudence of the Court is included in several hundred signed writings occupying portions of volumes sixty through ninety-four of the official reports of the State of New York. In his writings, you will see both good law and good sense-and every now and then a cherished Latin phrase, a jurisprudential nuance, a rubric, Occam's razor, and a twist or turn of phrase evidencing the unmistakable fingerprints of the preeminent lawyer and judge, scholar and teacher, Joseph W. Bellacosa. Battling out issues with him during deliberations was always a pleasure. Well, nearly always.

Today, however, I do not want to address internal battles in Court of Appeals deliberations, nor the range of issues we hear as Judges of the State's highest court. Those defy imagination. Any given day at Court of Appeals Hall could contain argument on education funding under the State Constitution alongside cases such as a slip-and-fall on a patch of ice in Forest Hills, a construction site injury under the Labor Law, a multiple murder case raising federal constitutional issues, and a certified question from the United States Court of Appeals for the second, or Third, or Fifth Circuit on an open question of New York State law. For me, my judicial role at the Court of Appeals is, and always has been, Lawyer Heaven-the absolute pinnacle of our great profession.

Instead, what I want to talk about today is the kind of problem that gives me, in my executive role as Chief Judge of the State of New York, the greatest "agita" (to use a favorite word of our honoree).

An enormous part of the business of state courts in the twenty-first century involves much more than looking to precedents, determining who is right and who is wrong under the law, and declaring a case concluded. That, of course, works well in a large segment of our dockets-commercial cases, personal injuries, property damage, or product liability. But we have literally millions of cases in our courts every year-especially our family and criminal courts-that, in the past thirteen-plus years of my term as Chief Judge, have constantly challenged us to think differently about the true meaning of delivering justice.

This is not an issue that has concerned New York alone. In a speech to the American Bar Association a couple of years ago, United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy challenged the ABA to address what he called the "inadequacies" and "injustices" of our prison and correctional systems.3