There is general agreement that New York state needs to expand the number of Supreme Court justices to tackle a mammoth backlog in the aftermath of the pandemic that has forced litigants to wait in some cases years to resolve cases involving commercial, marital, malpractice, criminal and a myriad of other matters that come before the courts.
There are proposals in the State Legislature to try and do just that. But this is a case where the seemingly “easy fix” is not so simple when you take a closer look.
Justices of the New York State Supreme Court are constitutional officers, and the state Constitution mandates the establishment of one Supreme Court for each 50,000 residents in each of the state’s 13 judicial districts.