State Senate's rush to judgeships

Daily Point

LIers stake court claims, poke process

In its rush to adjourn last week, and not without criticism, the State Senate quickly confirmed Gov. Kathy Hochul’s judicial nominations, including two Long Islanders to $136,700 judgeships on the state’s Court of Claims, which exclusively handles civil litigation seeking damages against the state and entities such as the Thruway Authority.

In Nassau County, the court added lawyer Ellen Tobin, associated for eight years with Westerman Ball Ederer Miller Zucker & Sharfstein, LLP, based in Uniondale. She’s married to Todd Kaminsky, the former 9th District Democratic state senator who ran unsuccessfully in 2021 for Nassau County district attorney and now works for law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP.

In Suffolk County, the claims court adds Aletha V. Fields, who has served as a support magistrate in the Family Court for 26 years. Magistrates oversee such matters as child support and paternity. She’s also the co-founder and former treasurer of the Suffolk County Hispanic Bar Association, according to a statement from Hochul’s office.

As it turned out, statements from the Senate floor on these confirmations brought up wider political themes and controversies.

For one, Sen. Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx) was quoted as saying that the number of Hispanic judicial appointments (such as Fields') remain few and far between. Sepulveda had been a vocal supporter of Justice Hector D. LaSalle for chief judge of the state’s Court of Appeals, a Hochul nominee who met with an unprecedented rejection by the chamber’s Democratic majority during the session just ended.

But in an identity “first” that drew praise during the hearings, the Court of Claims in Manhattan now gets the country’s first openly transgender male judge, Seth Marnin. Most recently, he was director of training and education for the Office of Equal Opportunity & Affirmative Action at Columbia University.

GOP senators from Long Island criticized not the nominees but the last-minute group-packaging of these confirmations from the governor’s office that didn’t allow for review before the vote. As quoted in the New York Law Journal, Sen. Dean Murray (R-East Patchogue) said: “Everyone’s scrambling to get things done at the last minute, and this is how we are nominating 19 judges? And to top it off, we are not voting on 19 judges individually, on their individual merit.”

Sen. Steve Rhoads (R-Bellmore), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he got only 24 hours notice of Hochul’s nominations and that the candidates found out they were being nominated with 48 hours notice — even though the judgeships were open for months.

Rhoads was quoted by the New York Law Journal as saying: “It’s disrespectful, to be perfectly honest, to the nominees, disrespectful to us as senators, and I would hope that the governor is somehow listening and would take that into account to get us these nominees earlier, so that we can treat these nominees with the respect that they deserve.”

Short shrift on hearings and oversight have been a sore point at the state Capitol on other legislation, too.

The 15 Court of Claims appointments and reappointments that earned Senate approval Saturday carry nine-year terms. In addition, the Senate confirmed a Family Court judge for Monroe County, and three acting Supreme Court justices, including Maureen Liccione in Suffolk, who was reappointed.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

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Reference Point

A dig at the 'country house complex' of Robert Moses

Newsday editorials have taken many forms — from regular prose to song parodies to lists of mass shootings. Among the most striking was one published 73 years ago in the form of a letter to one of the most powerful people in New York State.

Its title was a giveaway.

“Dear Mr. Moses:” was a missive directed at Robert Moses, the master planner and chairman of the Long Island State Parks Commission. And it ran side-by-side with a letter to Newsday from Moses himself, who criticized the editorial board for its position on a new ordinance adopted by the Town of Babylon.

The law — an apparent reaction to the post-World War II boom on Long Island epitomized by the explosion of small houses in Levittown — required that all new houses in Babylon have at least 800 square feet on the ground floor, which Moses called “a reasonable, decent and human standard for new dwellings” and not an “exclusive” restriction limiting who can live on Long Island.

The board in its letter/editorial on June 15, 1950, countered that an 800-square-foot standard, larger than the original Levittown houses, “would prevent moderate wage-earners, many of them veterans, from owning homes. If the houses are small, owners can build on and enlarge them later.”

Moses and the board also engaged in some back-and-forth on policies in other towns offered as a comparison to Babylon, with the board writing that even if its figures were wrong, “it still doesn’t alter the basic argument. Housing rules should be protective to everybody, not prohibitive to one special group.”

Moses was not the type to back down, writing, “The Long Island State Park Commission has a habit of being right on these matters and is entitled to be heard because it has a great stake in the use and protection of parks and parkways.”

But the board responded in kind. “You say the Long Island State Park Commission of which you are President, has a habit of being right. We agree,” the board wrote. “But habitual isn’t always, and the Commission can and does sometimes err. Trying to keep service men off the gold course at Bethpage State Park on week ends in 1944 by making them pay to play was an error.”

As in any good feud, adjectives and other descriptive words were spilled.

Newsday’s board, which at one point referred to the power broker as “Bob,” wrote that “lots of people are blooping and howling over Babylon’s new ordinance …”

Moses said it would be “inhuman, stupid and ruinous to a suburban community as far out as Babylon” to allow such small houses to be built.

And that, the board wrote, “may be the key to why we can’t see eye-to-eye with you on housing. We got over regarding Nassau and Suffolk as ‘suburbia’ long ago. They have a million people — probably more than Boston, St. Louis, Baltimore or Cleveland. Don’t you think it is time we outgrew the country house complex?”

Perhaps that last dig was rooted in something neither side acknowledged in that 1950 exchange: Moses’ longtime home was Babylon Village. His Thompson Avenue residence was in a neighborhood where few houses could be accused of being small. Could Moses have been seeking to protect his own turf?

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com and  Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com