The state Constitution empowers the New York City mayor to appoint judges to the city’s Criminal and Family Courts for 10-year terms, and to fill interim vacancies on Civil Court. While the Constitution grants the mayor an unfettered right to name these judges, for nearly 50 years, successive mayors have self-limited their discretion in order to ensure that appointees are qualified and to guard against improper political interference.
Like his six immediate predecessors, Mayor Mamdani pledged to channel his appointment power through the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, a 19-member body that screens candidates according to Mamdani’s Jan. 2 Executive Order. The committee ensures that the judicial appointment process is “merit-based, independent, fair and publicly credible” and prohibits the mayor from appointing a person to the bench unless the person is “nominated by the Committee.”
Mayors’ unbroken adherence to the committee’s screening process is one of the unheralded triumphs of city government. The committee’s thorough and confidential vetting helps to ensure that only qualified candidates become judges, substantially eliminating the political influence that often results in the selection or election of people without the experience or temperament for the bench.
Yet more than seven months after he published his executive order, Mamdani has not named a single member to the committee other than its chairman, Ali Najmi, and now the panel’s executive director has resigned. So there’s a committee with no members and no staff.
And unlike previous chairs, Najmi has an active law practice in which, according to his website, it is likely that he or lawyers from his firm will appear before the judges that the committee selects for appointment or for re-appointment. Najmi’s dual role as a lawyer practicing before city judges and as chair of the screening committee creates at least the appearance of a conflict of interest that undermines the very purpose of the committee’s existence.
Because the mayor has not appointed any of the other members, judicial appointments have stalled. Mamdani issued a total of 12 appointments and re-appointments in his first week in office, but made no others. Unless Mamdani is prepared to ignore his own order and nearly 50 years of good government practice, he cannot make any judicial appointments until he fills the committee’s open slots.
According to the city’s website, six of the 109 Criminal Court judgeships are vacant, depriving the court of a full complement of the judges who arraign every defendant and who preside over the enormous volume of misdemeanor cases that flows through courts in every borough. The terms of five Criminal Court judges expire at the end of the year. Three of the 67 judgeships on the notoriously backlogged Family Court are unfilled, with one judge’s term due to expire in November.
Even if Mamdani named 18 members immediately, under the committee’s well-established procedures, it would take months to vet and submit nominees for the mayor’s consideration. The current vacancies will thus remain unfilled for the foreseeable future, with more looming as terms expire towards the end of the year.
Mamdani, therefore, must act quickly to fill the open positions on the committee and hire new staff to ensure that the city’s courts have a full complement of qualified judges, chosen through a fair and independent process and must resolve the conflict of interest that arises as a result of his selection of a lawyer with business before the city’s courts as the committee’s chairman.
Browne is a lawyer.