Historical Society of the NY Courts

06/02/2026

A documentary about the Calico Rebellion and the Anti-Rent Wars just came out. What does that have to do with Pride Month? More than you would think.

In the 1840s, tenant farmers across upstate New York rose up against the patroon system, the manorial land arrangement that kept them paying rent to landlords in perpetuity. To resist sheriffs and rent collectors, they disguised themselves in calico gowns and masks and called themselves Calico Indians. The disguises let them act without being identified. Three people were killed before it ended, including an undersheriff shot at a farm in Andes in 1845.

That same year, Governor Silas Wright signed a law making it a crime to appear in public disguised or with the face concealed. It was aimed squarely at the Calico Indians. The anti-rent movement won most of what it wanted. The 1846 constitution reformed the land system. The disguises came off.

The law stayed.

Over the next century, police used that 1845 statute against a population it was never written for. Cross-dressers, drag performers, and gender nonconforming people were arrested under it. By the mid-twentieth century it was tied to an informal “three-article rule,” the demand that a person wear at least three items of clothing matching their assigned s*x. The law named no group, but the police read its broad language as license to harass and arrest anyone whose dress crossed gender lines. It was one of the tools used to justify the raids that led to Stonewall in 1969.

This is a pattern that consistently repeats. Laws written for one purpose have repeatedly been turned against LGBTQ New Yorkers. Vagrancy statutes, disorderly conduct charges, loitering laws, liquor regulations. None of them named the people they were used against. They did not have to. Broad language and animus were enough.

 

06/01/2026

June is ! This month, we’ll be looking at the history of LGBTQ rights in New York, with a focus on the legal work that shaped it.

Legal advocacy drove the movement as much as anything else. Organizations took discrimination cases to court in the 1970s when legislation wasn’t moving. Plaintiffs put their names on cases knowing what it would cost them. Arguments that lost were refined and tried again.
New York was at the center of much of that work. Lambda Legal was founded here in 1973.

The New York Court of Appeals struck down the state’s consensual so**my law in 1980, thirteen years before the Supreme Court addressed the question nationally. In 1989, that same court ruled that the definition of family under rent stabilization law could include a same-s*x partner, in a case that turned on whether Miguel Braschi could remain in the apartment he had shared with his deceased partner. Edith Windsor lived in New York. Our trustee Roberta Kaplan argued her case before the Supreme Court in 2013. The Marriage Equality Act was signed in Albany in 2011 after years of legislative defeat.

These are New York stories. The cases, the lawyers, the organizations, and the legislative fights that ground on for years before they moved. This month, we’ll be sharing some of  them.

05/29/2026

May is , and New York’s highest court offers history worth marking: five times in the twentieth century, the Court of Appeals was led by a Jewish American Chief Judge.

Benjamin Nathan Cardozo became Chief Judge in 1927. His family was among the oldest Sephardic Jewish families in America, with roots in New York predating the Revolution. A cousin was Emma Lazarus, whose words appear on the Statue of Liberty. His opinions in MacPherson v. Buick and Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad reshaped American tort law. In 1932, President Hoover appointed him to the United States Supreme Court, where he succeeded Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Sitting beside him on the court for those final years was Irving Lehman, the son of Mayer Lehman, one of the founders of Lehman Brothers. Lehman joined the court in 1924 and became Chief Judge in 1940. He and Cardozo were close friends. When Cardozo died in 1938, Lehman delivered the memorial address at the City Bar Association. Lehman died in office in September 1945.

Stanley Fuld, born in Manhattan in 1903, was appointed to the court by Governor Dewey in 1946 at age 42, the youngest such appointment in the court’s history. He served twenty-seven years as an associate judge before being elected Chief Judge in 1967, unopposed. He retired in 1973 and lived to 99.

Charles Breitel, whose father had emigrated from Lemberg, in what is now Ukraine, joined the court in 1967 and served as Chief Judge from 1974 to 1978. During his tenure, voters approved a constitutional amendment ending the popular election of Court of Appeals judges and replacing it with a merit selection process.

Judith Kaye, whose parents were Polish Jewish immigrants who had farmed in Sullivan County, became Chief Judge in 1993. She was the first woman to hold the office, the longest-serving Chief Judge in New York history, and the founder of this Society.

05/27/2026

The rotunda at 60 Centre Street is the heart of the building. You walk in from Centre Street, down a colonnaded corridor that slopes gently downward, and the space opens around you: marble columns, an inlaid floor, a ceiling 75 feet overhead ringed by a balcony on the second floor. That ceiling has been painted since the 1930s with a single continuous fresco by Attilio Pusterla, an Italian immigrant who had arrived in New York in 1899 and spent years on scaffolding completing it. He called it “The Law Through the Ages.”

The painting circles the dome in six sections, each representing two episodes from the history of law. It begins in Assyrian and Egyptian antiquity, with Hammurabi and Moses at the top, and moves through Persian, Hebraic, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Frankish, English, and Colonial law before arriving at the United States. Solon and Cicero face each other across the Greek and Roman section. Justinian and Theodora stand beside Charlemagne in the Byzantine and Frankish. King John appears with Magna Carta. In the English and Colonial section, a medallion above carries the image of Luther alongside the symbols of the English king and a Medici pope. Washington and Lincoln are in the American section. Frederick Douglass is in the lower right corner.

Each section carries a medallion above it bearing the symbols of the civilization shown. Swipe through the full ceiling in the images above. The composition reads as a single argument: that law has a history, that it was made by people across centuries and civilizations, and that it belongs to everyone who walks through this door. Up one flight of stairs, the same artists told a much smaller, much older New York story.

05/25/2026

Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, a day for placing flowers on the graves of those who died in military service. In the years after the Civil War, communities across the country gathered in cemeteries and public squares to honor the dead. In New York, those observances became part of local civic life. People gathered at village greens, churches, courthouses, and monuments. They read names, decorated graves, listened to speeches, and made public space for grief.

That local character still matters. Memorial Day is a national holiday, but it has always been observed close to home. The names on a monument are not dusty relics. They belong to people who came from particular streets, towns, neighborhoods, and families. They left from places others knew. They were mourned by communities that had to find some way to carry their loss.

Courthouses often stood near the center of those communities. In many county seats, the courthouse square was where public memory took shape. It was where people gathered for ceremonies, where monuments were placed, and where civic life was made visible. That setting gave Memorial Day a particular meaning. The same public spaces associated with law and local government also became places where communities honored those who died in service.

The connection is not complicated, but it is worth remembering. Democratic institutions depend on more than written law. They depend on people willing to sustain them, serve them, and, in war, defend the country they belong to. Memorial Day asks us to pause over that cost. It asks us to remember the dead not only as part of national history, but as part of local history, carried by the communities that knew their names and returned to them year after year.

Today, we honor those who died in service to the United States. We also honor the families, neighbors, and local institutions that keep their memory alive throughout the year, through gathering, naming, and remembering.

05/22/2026

Charles Stebbins Fairchild was born April 30, 1842, in Cazenovia. He attended a local seminary, graduated from Harvard College in 1863, then Harvard Law School in 1865. He joined a law practice in Albany with Hand, Hale & Swartz and married Helen Lincklaen in 1871.

In 1874 Fairchild was appointed Deputy Attorney General of New York. He prosecuted New York City Police Commissioners Oliver Charlick and Hugh Gardner for removing elected inspectors without notice, securing convictions. When Samuel J. Tilden was elected governor, he directed Fairchild to lead the prosecution of the Canal Ring, a network of politicians and contractors who had defrauded the state on canal construction contracts.

Tilden backed Fairchild for Attorney General in 1875. He was elected and served from 1876 to 1877. Despite his efforts, he failed to break the Canal Ring and was not reelected. In January 1878, Governor Lucius Robinson nominated him for Superintendent of Public Works, but the State Senate rejected him.

Fairchild resumed his law practice until 1885, when President Grover Cleveland appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. When Secretary Daniel Manning’s health forced his resignation in 1887, Fairchild succeeded him and served through 1889. The Treasury faced a massive surplus from high taxes and customs collections. After Congress refused to reduce taxes or allow deposits in commercial banks, Fairchild bought back government bonds to dispose of surplus revenue, averting a financial crisis.

After Cleveland’s defeat in 1888, Fairchild became president of the New York Security and Trust Company, serving until 1904. He remained active in Democratic politics as a Gold Democrat opposed to William Jennings Bryan. He became president of the American Constitutional League, an anti-suffrage organization. In 1920 he challenged the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in federal court. The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that Fairchild lacked standing to challenge the amendment’s ratification.

Fairchild died in 1924, in Cazenovia at 82, the last surviving member of Cleveland’s first administration.

05/21/2026

Chief Judge Hiram Denio (pronounced Da-NIGH-o) was born in Rome, New York, on May 21, 1799. He began studying law at seventeen under Judge Joshua Hathaway of Rome, later read in the office of Storrs & White in Whitesboro, and was admitted to the bar in 1821.

He practiced in Rome with Wheeler Barnes, then relocated to Utica in 1826, forming a new practice with E.A. Wetmore. He served as Oneida County District Attorney from 1825 to 1834, when he was appointed Circuit Judge and Vice-Chancellor for the Fifth Circuit. Four years later, illness forced him to resign. He served as Bank Commissioner from 1838 to 1840, then as court reporter, publishing five volumes of Denio’s Reports between 1845 and 1848. In 1852, he and William Tracy edited a two-volume edition of the Revised Statutes of New York.

In June 1853, Governor Horatio Seymour appointed him to the Court of Appeals to fill a vacancy. He was reelected twice and served as Chief Judge from 1856 through 1857. Throughout this period and well beyond, he served as trustee of Hamilton College, a commitment that ran from 1835 until his death.

His most consequential opinion came in Lemmon v. The People (1860). Eight enslaved people had been brought voluntarily into New York by a Virginia woman in transit to Texas. Denio, the only Democrat on the majority, wrote the opinion holding that New York law governed their status within New York’s borders. They were free. The court rejected the logic of Dred Scott, four years after that decision came down. The Civil War began the following year.

In 1857, while still Chief Judge, Denio wrote to the Assembly Judiciary Committee calling for a change in how the court selected its judges. The rotating system was making the court unworkable, he said. That reform arrived twelve years later, without him.

Read more at https://tinyurl.com/hondenio & https://tinyurl.com/lemmonny

       

05/21/2026

Great coverage by amny of Monday night's historical reenactment of the Fred Korematsu case:

Reliving History: Appellate Division, First Department Reenacts Landmark Korematsu Civil Rights Case During AAPI Heritage Month

Appellate Division Lawyers at the First Department reenact the landmark case Korematsu vs US Supreme Court.

05/20/2026

On Monday, audiences were treated to another outstanding historical reenactment of a landmark case in the courtroom of the Appellate Division, First Department. The program revisited the case of Fred Korematsu, who challenged the U.S. government’s decision to forcibly relocate and incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II. In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the internment policy as a matter of “military necessity.” The decision was later widely condemned, Korematsu’s conviction was vacated in 1983, and the Supreme Court formally repudiated the ruling in 2018.

The cast featured Appellate Division, First Department justices and staff, along with Karen Korematsu, daughter of Fred Korematsu. Hon. Denny Chin and Kathy Hirata Chin, who developed the script and also served as narrators, guided the audience through the origins of the conflict, the legal proceedings and appeals, and the lasting consequences of this troubling chapter in American history.

Following the reenactment — which concluded with a standing ovation — Judge Chin and Ms. Chin led a thoughtful discussion with Ms. Korematsu, sharing personal reflections and insights into the long fight for justice.

The event was presented in recognition of Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month by the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, First Department, in partnership with The Center of Asian Americans and the Law and the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, and sponsored by the Historical Society of the New York Courts.

05/18/2026

On May 17, 1870, New York held an election unlike any it had run before. Three years of argument, one failed constitutional convention, one narrow popular vote, and a legislative session that had terminated every sitting judge’s term had led to this: New York would choose its highest court from scratch, by popular ballot.

It did not go without interference. In April, Boss Tweed pushed a new charter for New York City through the legislature and scheduled the city’s first municipal election under that charter for the same day as the judicial vote. The calculation was straightforward: flood the polls with Tammany voters from the city and drown the upstate Republican majority. Tweed had the votes in the legislature to make it happen, and he did.

It worked, in the way Tammany things usually worked. Democrats swept the field. Sanford E. Church defeated Republican Henry R. Selden for Chief Judge, 239,890 to 151,978. Four of the six associate judge seats went to Democrats.

But the ballot structure held. Each party’s ticket had carried only four associate judge candidates. Voters cast four ballots, not six. Whatever Tammany delivered, it could not deliver a sixth seat that didn’t exist. Republicans Charles J. Folger and Charles Andrews were elected regardless. Minority representation had been guaranteed by design, and it survived Tammany Hall at full strength.

Of the seven judges who took the bench on July 4, only one had sat on the old court. The rotating system was gone. The legislature-dominated predecessor was a memory. What replaced it: seven judges, fourteen-year terms, mandatory retirement, a Chief Judge chosen by the whole state, and two minority seats that no political machine could touch.
New York had looked at what it built in 1847, decided it wasn’t working, and replaced it entirely. The court that took the bench on July 4, 1870 is, in its essential structure (though judges are now chosen by appointment rather than popular ballot), the Court of Appeals that still sits in Albany today.